I like this article, but given the number of misreads (small, in the example given) it might have been easier to diff a couple of OCR'd versions and just look up the diffs manually.
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
#72Good story, I liked how they were almost thwarted by FCC fax regulations.
I also love how they required this to always know the sender of the fax, but then not requiring you to fill in a name…
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#73> I try a bunch of different OCR programs, but can't find any that can transcribe the document with 100% accuracy. They often confuse certain letters or numbers (like 0 and C, 9 and 4, 0 and D). Sometimes they omit characters, sometimes they introduce new ones. I try different font sizes and different fonts, but it doesn't matter. I decided to OCR a hex dump from an old computer magazine a while back and fixed this p…
Programming environments were available of course, but none were built-in. The fact that the external floppy doesn't work is the main problem here.
I think a better solution would have been to use the serial port rather than the modem port to send a fax. Serial-to-USB adapters are easy to find.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#74He says that there are internal speakers, but no jack. If it were me, I would have cracked the case open and tapped into the audio going to the speakers directly and recorded it from another device, but then again this makes a much more satisfying hack.
That was my first thought too!
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#75> I try a bunch of different OCR programs, but can't find any that can transcribe the document with 100% accuracy. They often confuse certain letters or numbers (like 0 and C, 9 and 4, 0 and D). Sometimes they omit characters, sometimes they introduce new ones. I try different font sizes and different fonts, but it doesn't matter. I decided to OCR a hex dump from an old computer magazine a while back and fixed this p…
That could become an automated improvement as well... although it was probably published in some paper 40 years ago and I just don't know the name of it.
Basically a second-pass where you look for outliers in each character-group, reassign them to another group, and keep the change if it improves similarity-scores the character groups involved. Then iterate a bit until nothing seems to be improving.
For example, one might find "the 3 that is least-like all the other 3s", temporarily reassign it to "8", and then keep that change if it means an improvement in the the scores for "how closely all sub-pictures of 3s resemble each other" and "how closely all sub-pictures 8s resemble each other".
That might backfire if a document has different typefaces in it though, where it makes the mistake of putting all "3"s from different typefaces together, ruining the group-similarity scores.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 012345M7XPAVKHEF
Nope! That's a good idea though.
The transcription errors I was getting were not consistent. Like, D would be O or 0 or D, with no apparent rhyme or reason to it. And the turnaround time on each fax attempt was long enough that I focused on doing the image recognition myself instead.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#77I did tech support for my college's library. Someone donated some collection to the library and their catalog of it was in a spreadsheet on an Amiga 2000. I was tasked with recovering it. The Amiga turned on, but its normal monitor connection didn't work. It did have another connector that I hooked up to a CRT TV and got a blurry black and white output. I think I used a floppy disk to copy the file off, and the format was not supported so I picked through the plain text view to get the info.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#78In the picture with the phone cable plugged into the modem port directly next to it appears to be an Ethernet port. I know the blog post says there was "no networking software" installed, but the OS came with file sharing capabilities built in. Someone would have had to gone to effort to remove it. It might even have an old school FTP client.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#79I 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…
There is nothing pristine about images transmitted over Fax. It's such a grotty old technology with loads of aliasing issues. A modern cell phone picture of a word screen full of hex would almost certainly be easier to OCR.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#80He says that there are internal speakers, but no jack. If it were me, I would have cracked the case open and tapped into the audio going to the speakers directly and recorded it from another device, but then again this makes a much more satisfying hack.
Same. Solder one of the $1 audio cables I’ve got lying around to the speaker leads and run it into your choice of audio recorders, play the files and you’re done in 5 minutes with basically no losses.