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How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop

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Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop

#251

Post by netsharc »

Terretta wrote: post #248

"Think Alert Sound" I see in the dialog box -- is that the "I'm trying to think but nothing happens!" error message alert sound popular on Macs of that era? (We had that sound in the office, and many more.) The sound I recall is the last phrase in 3stooges05.mp3 from here: https://www.barbneal.com/the-collection/tv-shows/the-three-s... Everyone's talking about the way to connect to the Mac, I'm just wondering if it's…

In the spirit of creativity, I downloaded that MP3 and compared the waveform of the phrase and the one on the page. They don't seem to match.

Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop

#253

Post by btbuildem »

coolcoder613 wrote: post #232
btbuildem wrote: post #46

My first thought was to use the serial port, but perhaps that was unavailable on the recipient hardware? The second, much more entertaining approach, would've been to harken back to the very arcane days of ZX Spectrums and C64s with tape drives... since the old laptop had functional speakers, it may have been possible to write a bit of code that endcoded the binary data to an audio stream, played that over the speake…

This "binary data" already is audio. The author did not want to do that because of the loss of fidelity.

Seems like I didn't get the idea across clearly. While audio files are binary data, they're encoded in a specific way, and use specific playback codecs to render that binary into data suitable for playback by soundcard chipsets.

Back, way back in the day (but not as far back as punch cards, but before diskettes), binary streams were persisted to tape. Not the backup tape used today, but regular audio cassettes. The data was converted into an audio stream, similar in nature to what you'd hear during a modem handshake. On the receiving end, the audio stream was decoded back into binary data, without any loss (well, given the robustness of error correction back then, sometimes you'd have to try again). The key point being, the audio was just a transport layer for binary data, which could have been anything -- images, code, text, audio files, etc.

Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop

#254

Post by kortex »

coolcoder613 wrote: post #232
btbuildem wrote: post #46

My first thought was to use the serial port, but perhaps that was unavailable on the recipient hardware? The second, much more entertaining approach, would've been to harken back to the very arcane days of ZX Spectrums and C64s with tape drives... since the old laptop had functional speakers, it may have been possible to write a bit of code that endcoded the binary data to an audio stream, played that over the speake…

This "binary data" already is audio. The author did not want to do that because of the loss of fidelity.

Sounds like GP is suggesting digitally encoding/modulating the audio bitstream, like using the speaker as a modem. Which would be far less lossy than trying to record the analog signal.

Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop

#255

Post by Terretta »

netsharc wrote: post #251
Terretta wrote: post #248

"Think Alert Sound" I see in the dialog box -- is that the "I'm trying to think but nothing happens!" error message alert sound popular on Macs of that era? (We had that sound in the office, and many more.) The sound I recall is the last phrase in 3stooges05.mp3 from here: https://www.barbneal.com/the-collection/tv-shows/the-three-s... Everyone's talking about the way to connect to the Mac, I'm just wondering if it's…

In the spirit of creativity, I downloaded that MP3 and compared the waveform of the phrase and the one on the page. They don't seem to match.

Only the very last phrase of it, not the whole thing.

You'd have to "trim" it (e.g. quicktime), then using Garage Band you can make it a iOS ring tone (how I rebuilt my pre OSX Mac sounds from original sources).

Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop

#256

Post by anthk »

coolcoder613 wrote: post #232
btbuildem wrote: post #46

My first thought was to use the serial port, but perhaps that was unavailable on the recipient hardware? The second, much more entertaining approach, would've been to harken back to the very arcane days of ZX Spectrums and C64s with tape drives... since the old laptop had functional speakers, it may have been possible to write a bit of code that endcoded the binary data to an audio stream, played that over the speake…

This "binary data" already is audio. The author did not want to do that because of the loss of fidelity.

Minimodem using 1200 BPS with Opus@64KBPS it's pretty usable, the file doesn't get very huge.

Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop

#257

Post by dredmorbius »

oneplane wrote: post #39
ruslan wrote: post #12

Arn't there a serial (COM) port available on that laptop ? It was kind of ubiquitous at those days. This website [1] says there were two of them. Solving the probem with Zmodem would be trivial. The software (terminal) is already there, it seems. 1. https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook_duo/specs/mac_p...

You can indeed use xmodem or zmodem, and use a macbinary encoding to transfer any file you want in either direction. Does require you to have something that can receive over serial on the PowerBook. ClarisWorks could definitely do it, but office probably has exactly the same 'receive document' feature. Alternatively, you can use the serial port to 'print' to, and just capture the serial output. It's essentially just…

Many moons ago I'd bootstrapped a Linux install on a circa-1990 laptop which afforded a floppy drive, serial, and parallel ports, but no innate networking (a 32-bit PCMCIA network card was later possible but required drivers and/or kernel support to be compiled).

I'd pieced together the install by splitting a tar.gz across multiple floppy transfers, then enabled SLIP and zmodem which permitted copying uu-encoded files for further support, then SLIP and PLIP. The latter was particularly useful as I could sustain multiple simultaneous network connections: both an SSH session and scp'ing across files for further support, rather than running a console under minicom. SLIP was bound at somewhere around 9600 AFAIR, fine for a terminal session, but cramping my style for file transfers. (It may have been faster, 38,400 and 56k are available modem rates.) PLIP IIRC was at or approaching Mb/s speeds, which was (comparatively) blazing.

Though the sheer audacity of copy-pasting uuencoded files through minicom had a certain coolness factor.

Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop

#258

Post by dredmorbius »

tfvlrue wrote: post #155
canucker2016 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the screenshot after the picture of the battery and a picture of a circuit diagram, we can see that the fax software is from Global Village ("GlobalFax PowerPort/Mercury Duo", probably v2.5) GlobalFax had a terminal emulator app included, most likely ZTerm, in this case. from https://tagn.wordpress.com/2023/09/10/tech-support-at-the-vi... : " the absolute garbage terminal emulator software we were including in t…

Awesome sleuthing! Should we discover any more files to recover from the laptop, I may explore this avenue a bit further. If the ZTerm software is present, the trickiest part might be physically connecting the serial port to something else. Not an insurmountable problem.

SLIP, zmodem, and uuencode are tremendously useful when no other options are available.

I suspect you won't even have uudecode, in which case so long as you can transfer binary files, self-extracting ZIP files should work. Might take a while for larger transfers.

Getting a Real Operating System onto the old laptop would be a benefit. You might want to look into boot-from-floppy options including TomsRootBoot and Trinux. The former fits onto a single 1.5 MB floppy ("superformatted" to about 1.7 or 1.8 MB). The latter uses 2--3 disk images to include a number of more formidable tools.

Trinux still has a Sourceforge page, though I've not dug into it. You may need to hit up Internet Archive for working images:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/trinux/>

A 2001 white-paper: https://www.sans.org/white-papers/327/>

Tom's Root Boot ... seems to now be offline, but has a Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomsrtbt>

And numerous Wayback captures. The one from 2008 should be functional and suit your hardware:

https://web.archive.org/web/20080724163531/www.toms.net/rb>

November 2023 appears to be the most recent active capture:

https://web.archive.org/web/20231123003805/http://www.toms.n...>

And a ~2001 article describing TRB's capabilities: https://www.linux.com/news/little-linux-distribution-could-t...>

Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop

#259

Post by Gormo »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #183
Anarch157a wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need for any programming language in Windows 9X, just open a DOS prompt and use 'copy file.txt COM1: /B'. We used that trick back in the DOS days to print raw ASCII files on parallel (LPT1:) or serial (COM1:) devices. I'm willing to bet it still works on Win11.

> I'm willing to bet it still works on Win11. It might not. A lab I was at in uni still had Windows XP PCs because according to them, that's the last Windows OS that allowed direct serial/paralel port access needed to control the external robotics/CNCs via those old APIs the SW used, since subsequent versions of Windows abstracted away those direct HW API calls that DOS used in the name of security and stability.

What OS-level APIs would something communicating over serial be using? Sure, Windows abstracts the hardware, but that's been true since well before Windows XP, and modern versions of Windows still expose virtual COM ports for serial adapters connected through USB or PCIE, just as XP did.

In fact, even DOS abstracts away serial communications: your hardware would be set to a specific I/O port and IRQ, but DOS exposes those as I/O devices, so you would just read and write to COM1, COM2, etc.

My guess is that there's some other issue running that old Windows program on modern versions of Windows -- maybe some components are 16-bit, and since current 64-bit Windows doesn't include the VDM, they can't run. Or maybe it's an issue with current versions of certain DLLs.

Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop

#260

Post by Amorymeltzer »

Cockbrand wrote: post #99

ResEdit... now that's a name I hadn't heard in a long time. ResEdit was really a fantastic tool to do all sorts of tinkering. Too bad pretty much all Mac software is signed now, so this kind of tinkering isn't possible any more.

Quite a memory. I'm fairly certain that using ResEdit to modify and create plug-ins for Escape Velocity: Nova (the sequel to EV Override in the games folder here) is what first got me interested in programming.
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