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How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
41–50 of 272 posts
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#42[deleted]
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#43[deleted]
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#44I 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…
Did you try a search-and-replace in Word, changing the problem characters to something else?
e.g.
0123456789ABCDEF
012345M7XPAVKHEFRe: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#45Arn'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...
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Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#46My 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 speakers, recorded on the recipient machine, and decoded it back to binary form there.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#47Arn'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...
Author here. It's a good question. It probably does, but I admit I'm not familiar with Zmodem. I don't recall finding a terminal application installed on the laptop, but maybe I just wasn't looking hard enough.
The faxing program you were using should have a terminal feature which was used to setup modem and to dial BBSes. :)
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
The CP/M side didn't have any terminal software. Both sides had methods to set 9600/n/8/1 on the printer device. On the PC side, without PROCOMM, it would be possible to "COPY COM1: FOO.TXT" but I don't know how 9600/n/8/1 could be set in advance (IIRC setting it as a printer to force the baud rate altered the device so it could not be read). Generally speaking, all of the pre-PC microcomputers implemented serial por…
Yes, you can transfer files via COM port in MS-DOS using COPY command, but errors may occur. :) Also you have to switch port to 8-bit binary mode and turn off flow control. Don't remember how to do that exactly. Default was 7 bit XON/XOFF, AFAIR.
Looks like it's the MODE command: https://home.csulb.edu/~murdock/mode.html
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#49A few years ago, I spent a fair share of time trying to copy files from and to a Macintosh Plus. I decided to use a 100 MB ZIP drive (actually two of them, SCSI for the Mac Plus and USB for a modern computer) and later a serial port connection with terminal software [1].
Now there's a much better and cheaper option: BlueSCSI [2]. It's a SCSI HDD emulator that allows to mount .img files stored on a SD card as HDD disks. It also supports CD and network card emulation.
Once the files are copied on a such a virtual drive, they can be extracted on a modern machine using via some kind of HFS explorer or an emulator.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think in this particular (macbook) case the problem was lack of proper software. Yet, I recall if there was modem installed, a terminal software had to be present as well.
Is it so hard to write your own program which would just read a file stream and send it to a port? Maybe also split it into smaller frames with CRC hashes attached.
Depends: I wonder what programming tools/languages were present on the old PowerBook. Otherwise, getting any handwritten program or its associated tools/runtimes (if necessary) onto the laptop might be just as much of a challenge as getting audio data off.