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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?
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…
For the record, you’d have had no problem mounting an image of the HFS disk on any modern Linux or macOS system.
Jeez, no floppy drive on this laptop? How did people install stuff back then? But thanks, this is inspirational :)
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...
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…
It's funny that we used to all blame WinModem vendors for making WinModems instead of blaming open source for not being able to write DSP code. To be fair, it was a lot younger then.
This laptop has a serial port, I am pretty sure vanilla Mac is capable of transferring files over serial port. We did that on DOS all the the time.
Sometime around 1993-1994, based on my placements against other relative events, I had the opportunity to "fix" a non-booting IBM Laptop. It was thick, heavy, and large but with just a screen the size of a 3½ Floppy. I have never encountered such a laptop in pictures or elsewhere, so I will assume it was even older in those years.
If anyone have any idea what that might be, it would be nice to see a picture.
An eccentric, out-of-time, local-uncle/mentor gave me that to fix and I let it lie on my table for a few days just to show off to others. I think we did something stupid and simple to fix it - replace the AUTOEXEC.BAT and then load WordStar, which was the only thing they need. Not even Windows 3x but DOS.
The Laptop was likely given by the visiting Christian Missionaries who visit the local Churches in my hometown.
I've another computer-fixing story, but I need to remember and write down the details. Sleeping in an army barrack in the mountains, armed guards while we pee, and returning home while taking care of a pregnant woman in an ambulance. That "mission" was with my childhood/neighbor friend, but he died. That out-of-time uncle also died. Not related.
Earlier 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.
Very creative and interesting ie 'use whatever tools/knowledge you have' but: > The internal hard drive uses SCSI with an unusual connector. This is literally never an issue as old connectors are easily obtainable (in particular 'in this day and age'). > Adapting it didn't seem straightforward, and we weren't confident the old file system (HFS) would be easy to read from a modern system. Simple search pulled this up.…
Author here. Admittedly I didn't explore this avenue very deeply. I was more focused on accomplishing this with parts I had on hand. A quick search yielded this result, which does confirm it's absolutely possible to adapt the drive: https://vintagemacmuseum.com/reading-powerbook-2-5-scsi-hard... (My way might be more fun. Ha.)