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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

#261

Post by [deleted] »

Sesse__ wrote: post #223
Rinzler89 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK about MacOS, but on Windows 9x/XP, sending bytes via serial was incredibly trivial in C#, Visual C++ or even ols school Visual Basic.[1] Even if you didn't have one of the dozens of already written serial terminal apps, you could write your own pretty easily in one of those languages to push bytes out the serial port, with just a few standard API calls. I doubt MacOS didn't have something similar. Unless of cours…

Windows 9x/XP did not come with C#, Visual C++ or Visual Basic. Likewise, classic macOS did not come with any programming or scripting languages. In this respect, they were equally “shitty”, and your solution would have been unavailable for both.

[deleted]

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

#262

Post by wizzwizz4 »

ratboy666 wrote: post #245
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Denoising algorithms are always lossy. An LLM (or, y'know, Markov chain) could do this job by exploiting statistical regularities in the English language, but a hex dump isn't quite the English language, so it'd be completely useless. Even if this text were English, though, the LLM would make opinionated edits (e.g. twiddling the punctuation): you'd be unlikely to get a faithful reproduction out the other end.

Of course, use search and replace to change 0 to zero... etc. The OCR will (should) work better.

You might as well just use an error-correction code: same result, less overhead.

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

#263

Post by oneplane »

dredmorbius wrote: post #258
tfvlrue wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Trin…

I don't think that will work on non-x86 architectures. As far as I know, you can't boot linux on 68LC040 at all, perhaps if someone forked uCLinux and made it work with no FPU and no MMU you might get something going, because all the 68k linux variants expect a MMU that works, which on that specific CPU is too buggy. You can't run MkLinux kernels either since those are PPC OldWorld, which came after 68k.

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

#264

Post by bas »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #236
lmz wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mac OS X is a UNIX (of sorts). Mac OS classic (as in the article) is most definitely not.

So that version of MAcOS had no possibility of some command line shell scripting?

Brings back memories, but you'd have to install a programming environment, e.g.:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer%27s_Works...

- http://www.think-pascal.org/#SetUp

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THINK_C

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

#265

Post by netsharc »

Terretta wrote: post #255
netsharc wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Yes I said phrase. Audacity can zoom in...

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

#266

Post by ComplexSystems »

tfvlrue wrote: post #23
mbreese wrote: post #2

I was actually expecting the author to take photos of the old laptop's screen and OCR those. This was far more entertaining. I do wonder though... perhaps it would have been faster to have the larger fonts and let the transfer take 24 minutes. It probably took longer than 24 minutes to write the updated OCR software. But, where's the fun in that?

Author here. Seeing how difficult it was to get a reliable OCR transcription with commercial software from a pristine, computer-generated representation of the text, I suspect trying to OCR photos would be even less reliable :) I simplified some things for brevity in the write-up. I did indeed try a bunch of fonts/font sizes (trying a single page at a time and manually inspecting the results) without much improvement…

Couldn't you just do a bunch of different faxes, perhaps in different fonts or different font sizes, which would lead to different randomly distributed errors? Then you can do OCR for all of them, and just take the median of the result, and get exponentially less error.

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

#267

Post by PhasmaFelis »

tfvlrue wrote: post #206
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #133

I'm slightly shocked that (all?) modern OCR systems can't handle a perfectly clean image of Courier text with 100% reliability. I wonder if reducing the font size for faster transmission made it worse? A larger font might have been easier to read. Probably save time in the long run. EDIT: Actually, looking at the output of the Fax to Binary Converter program, I think that's very likely. Even I'm not 100% sure whether…

Author here. I was also surprised by this. I simplified the story a bit for brevity. I actually tried a bunch of different font styles, including a 47 page fax using a pretty large size Courier (with only 72 characters per line). The screenshots from the blog post were after the point I decided OCR wasn't working, so I was using a heavily reduced font size to optimize the transfer time. Hence the characters looked li…

> I simplified the story a bit for brevity. I actually tried a bunch of different font styles, including a 47 page fax using a pretty large size Courier (with only 72 characters per line).

Wow. That is very surprising. I'm baffled.

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

#268

Post by dredmorbius »

oneplane wrote: post #263
dredmorbius wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Trin…

I don't think that will work on non-x86 architectures. As far as I know, you can't boot linux on 68LC040 at all, perhaps if someone forked uCLinux and made it work with no FPU and no MMU you might get something going, because all the 68k linux variants expect a MMU that works, which on that specific CPU is too buggy. You can't run MkLinux kernels either since those are PPC OldWorld, which came after 68k.

Oops, yeah, good call there.

There might be Powerbook Linux boot floppy, though NetBSD might be a better choice. The CPU appears to be a 68LC040: https://support.apple.com/en-us/112137>

A NetBSD install guide which seems to have worked for someone in 2012: https://web.archive.org/web/20120602135739/http://www.macuni...>

(Site is now SEO scambait.)

NetBSD docs: https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/macppc/>

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

#269

Post by oneplane »

dredmorbius wrote: post #268
oneplane wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that will work on non-x86 architectures. As far as I know, you can't boot linux on 68LC040 at all, perhaps if someone forked uCLinux and made it work with no FPU and no MMU you might get something going, because all the 68k linux variants expect a MMU that works, which on that specific CPU is too buggy. You can't run MkLinux kernels either since those are PPC OldWorld, which came after 68k.

Oops, yeah, good call there. There might be Powerbook Linux boot floppy, though NetBSD might be a better choice. The CPU appears to be a 68LC040: https://support.apple.com/en-us/112137 > A NetBSD install guide which seems to have worked for someone in 2012: https://web.archive.org/web/20120602135739/http://www.macuni... > (Site is now SEO scambait.) NetBSD docs: https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/macppc/ >

Looking at the reporting, it does seem like the 68LC040 emulation at least worked (just slightly buggy), which is much better than the not-booting Linux of the same era. I should probably not be surprised to see NetBSD run on yet another thing ;-)

I wonder what has been ported to more hardware at this point: NetBSD or bare metal Doom.

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

#270

Post by dredmorbius »

oneplane wrote: post #269
dredmorbius wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oops, yeah, good call there. There might be Powerbook Linux boot floppy, though NetBSD might be a better choice. The CPU appears to be a 68LC040: https://support.apple.com/en-us/112137 > A NetBSD install guide which seems to have worked for someone in 2012: https://web.archive.org/web/20120602135739/http://www.macuni... > (Site is now SEO scambait.) NetBSD docs: https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/macppc/ >

Looking at the reporting, it does seem like the 68LC040 emulation at least worked (just slightly buggy), which is much better than the not-booting Linux of the same era. I should probably not be surprised to see NetBSD run on yet another thing ;-) I wonder what has been ported to more hardware at this point: NetBSD or bare metal Doom.

Some years back I seem to recall Debian making the claim to support more hardware (if not necessarily the same hardware) as NetBSD. I cannot verify this presently however....
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