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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

#81

Post by jandrese »

immibis wrote: post #56
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…

a.k.a. a WinModem driver 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.

I don't think those old Macs used software modems. Honestly they probably couldn't, the CPU in these machines were not very fast and had some pretty horrendous bus contention issues. Servicing a realtime device is likely beyond their capabilities.

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

#84

Post by ruslan »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #62
rvense wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple used 8-pin mini DIN connectors for serial. The author might not have had the right cable.

Classic macs had RS-422 not RS-232 ports so you'll need more than just a dumb cable to get it working with a PC.

You are right, but it's possible to connect RS-422 to RS-232 using just proper wiring [1]. Basically, same three wires and one loop wire for RX+ to ground. It's not reliable and not recommended, but works and would solve the problem. :-)

1. https://stratusengineering.com/rs232-rs422485-conversion-cab...

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

#85

Post by eviks »

Since the two easier options of transferring data directly via the modem or connecting the hard drive were not explored properly, nor the third option of much bigger font size (let it take 8 overnight hours for large easily OCRable text?), maybe adding some kind of parity check could've helped restore audio perfectly?

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

#86

Post by Suppafly »

jandrese wrote: post #78

In 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.

That picture is of the thinkpad he used to receive the faxes. The mac doesn't have an ethernet port. I believe it would have had appletalk that maybe could have connected to ethernet using an adapter.

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

#87

Post by ska »

Years ago I had a (much older) colleague who seemed to obsessively copy data onto newer media, including transcoding file formats sometimes. I'm pretty sure it was to avoid this sort of dance and avoid thinking about what they might want to keep. They had a nightmare story of recovering data off an obsolete-ish tape format, after all...

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

#88

Post by ska »

Suppafly wrote: post #83

I'm not a Mac guy, but it seems like they glossed over all of the normal solutions to intentionally come up with weirdest one possible. Good for them getting the files they needed I guess, but still weird.

The serial ports might have been easier (depending what was on the machine already and what you have on hand) but it's not obvious. The real problem was the lack of functioning floppy drive. Most of the modern "normal solutions" wouldn't help.

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

#89

Post by flomo »

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…

It's highly unlikely any terminal software would be installed on an old Mac, even if it had a modem. (Although I don't know about Clarisworks.) It was counter to the whole mentality. There was a bootstrapping problem where you needed to get the software which allowed you to download the software, and even the common MacBinary/Stuffit/etc programs did not come with the system.

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

#90

Post by [deleted] »

lisper wrote: post #73
qiqitori wrote: post #22

> 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.

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