23 ms·

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

607 points by tfvlrue 2y ago

Cockbrand 2y ago
ResEdit... now that's a name I hadn't heard in a long time. ResEdit was really a fantastic tool to do all sorts of tinkering. Too bad pretty much all Mac software is signed now, so this kind of tinkering isn't possible any more.
- Amorymeltzer 2y ago
  Quite a memory. I'm fairly certain that using ResEdit to modify and create plug-ins for Escape Velocity: Nova (the sequel to EV Override in the games folder here) is what first got me interested in programming.
metalliqaz 2y ago
If you're just doing OCR you could have taken photos of the screen, right?
devit 2y ago
Seems far easier to figure out the hard drive connector and find software that can read the filesystem.
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
  Of the era, it's probably Apple proprietary connector sort of like IDE but maybe not.
MarkusWandel 2y ago
I keep an old USB-to-SCSI adapter cable handy for this sort of challenge. In general, I hoard any USB-to-X adapters that I come across (RS232, parallel printer port, USB floppy drive, USB optical drive). Of course if you don't have the right SCSI cable that may not be worth the effort in this case.
- morsch 2y ago
  Which SCSI? There's like five for just old school parallel SCSI.
- kosma 2y ago
  Hold onto it, these things are incredibly rare.
irusensei 2y ago
Uh... Laplink serial cable?
mmmlinux 2y ago
raspberry pi with serial and localtalk. done.
Dwedit 2y ago
Upon reading the headline, my guess for how to copy a file off would involve a Parallel-port ZIP drive on the old computer, then using a USB ZIP drive on the modern computer. Or a USB disk enclosure that uses IDE. Now I'll go read the article... Oh, it's about a Mac...
andix 2y ago
If it was an old DOS/Windows laptop, you could just use INTERLNK via COM or parallel port. I have to post that, it's just such a nostalgic memory copying files like that. So if somebody needs to do it: Dosbox + USB-RS232 adapter and the right cable. INTERLNK/SRV was included with DOS 6.0 and later, so it's rather easy to find.
amelius 2y ago
> The laptop has no audio jacks, so we couldn't get good analog copies of the recordings even if we wanted to. How about directly connecting a DSO to the speaker terminals?
pradmatic 2y ago
One of the coolest articles I’ve read lately. Thanks for sharing!
StillBored 2y ago
Appletalk is the way to go, the drivers are built in and apple did a good job of maintaining compatibility over a long timeframe. I have similar issues moving stuff between a IIGS and modern machines. Its possible to move stuff with floppy emulators, via scsi , or just raw serial, but the simplicity of having a Mac with both appletalk and ethernet, allows one to drag and drop entire file hierarchies between the target appletalk based machine and a SMB/etc share from the machine in the middle. Also SCSI tends to be easy to convert if one knows the drive connector/type, and is willing to chain a couple adapters. I'm sure that is the case here too, the 2.5" scsi drives were a form of SCA connectors IIRC, SCSI adapters exist for almost anything to anything as long as the single ended vs differential rules are followed, newer ultra differential adapters could usually fall back to 8 bit single ended allowing them to drive just about everything. The problem is going to be finding an OS/etc that can real the old mac filesystems although I'm guessing one of the utilities to read raw images (of which i'm failing to remember the ones Ive used in the past) could probably read/write the raw disk image.
- kelnos 2y ago
  > Appletalk is the way to go, the drivers are built in The article author claims the networking software wasn't installed, though. > Also SCSI tends to be easy to convert if one knows the drive connector/type, and is willing to chain a couple adapters. I was thinking this too. And the author also says they didn't believe they'd be able to read the HFS volume, but Linux has had an HFS driver for... decades?... at this point.
  - adrianmonk 2y ago
    I assume they must have meant it doesn't have any TCP/IP networking software installed. As I recall, Macs had AppleTalk hardware from the very beginning and AppleTalk software was a built-in part of Mac OS. I don't know if it's even possible to remove if you tried.
  - Sprotch 2y ago
    Appletalk was installed by default in all Macs of that era - the author is talking about TCP/IP
PhasmaFelis 2y ago
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 that 8x6 glob of pixels is a 0 or a D. Hmmm. If nothing else, what about search-and-replacing the Word doc to replace some of the most difficult characters with clearer ones, and then reversing the process on the other end? I mean, that's ridiculously complex, but not as complex as writing a custom Fax to Binary Converter app.
- tfvlrue 2y ago
  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 like barely-legible blobs. The Fax-to-Binary converter isn't doing anything particularly complicated with the image, just breaking it up into an accurately-aligned grid and hashing the pixel data of each tile. Replacing the characters in the document hadn't occurred to me at the time! It's a good idea, but for my programmer brain, writing this software was the easier (and more fun) solution :)
  - steve1977 2y ago
    Just out of curiosity, would that old Mac OS have had OCR A or OCR B fonts available? (pretty sure Windows would have). These were essentially designed for OCR (duh...)
    - tfvlrue 2y ago
      Nope, not that I found. The set of fonts installed was _very_ limited. I can't remember the exact count, but I think it was less than 20. Nothing specialized like an OCR font.
gizajob 2y ago
What about pointing a camera at the screen and then paging through all the numbers on the Mac while capturing images?? Then you could OCR the numbers directly on the capturing laptop rather than trying to convert sound back into text. 10/10 for ingenuity anyway using the fax port.
- sponaugle 2y ago
  I was thinking the same thing. A camera capture would be fast and accurate if you were going to ocr.
RIMR 2y ago
This is a neat trick and all, but if you could find the Duo Dock, it has a SCSI port on it to connect a second hard drive.
skeaker 2y ago
Maybe I missed it, but it seems the actual sound file that was transferred wasn't included in the post... A shame, since all that buildup had me wondering what the file was!
causality0 2y ago
How do you transfer files off an Apple laptop from 1994? It's harder than it sounds! Somewhat misleading. It would have been trivial if the laptop didn't have multiple hardware faults.
- ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
  To be expected from a 30 year old laptop no?
  - causality0 2y ago
    Sure, but it makes it sound like the laptop being old is what creates the problem, when it's the laptop being busted that's the problem.
notorandit 2y ago
Video hex display and camera recording...
j45 2y ago
Creative way to transfer a file. Could just use a serial cable on one end, and USB->serial or parallel port cable that could transfer files with the software to allow file transfers easily.
jeffbee 2y ago
Something is a little off about the statements regarding the rarity of HTTP in 1994. I didn't know anyone with a Mac that lacked Mosaic (or, later, Netscape) and NCSA Telnet.
kjellsbells 2y ago
This feels like a practical exam in information theory, and I love it. "You've got a 32,000 byte file to transmit over a channel of your choice. They all suck in some way. You have a smartphone, a serial port, and a computer. The computer has no compiler, but you can use any of its native facilities. Solutions that require more bytes of input (eg scripts) than are in the file to be transferred are disqualified. There is no time limit, but the fastest solution wins. Go." Given this is an old Mac, Im not sure I could have outdone the author. Although I was tempted by the notion that if you could replace visually similar chars like 3 and 8 with something very distinct (eg 8 with Z), then using a smartphone to capture the screen and OCR might be the fastest path of all. I think System 7 had AppleScript so perhaps that sed-like step is possible?
- anal_reactor 2y ago
  OCR from smartphone camera could easily make mistakes that would be difficult to detect and correct. What I would do is look for some kind of encoding that makes errors extremely unlikely. If I had to dump the entire laptop's drive, I'd rather leave the laptop running for a week once than use a faster method that introduces errors. I don't know much about error correction, so let's take naive approach. 320MB (drive size) in a week is 530 bytes per second. I don't know what's the screen refresh rate (and reaction time) but it's sensible to assume that if we display any image at 4Hz and record it with a smartphone, we won't miss frames or have any other funny artifacts. So it's like 135 bytes per frame, which is 1080 bits. If we divide the 8.4 inch 640x480 screen into squares 16 by 16 pixels, then we have 1000 squares 0.5 by 0.5cm. If each square is either black or white for 0.25 seconds, then camera artifacts shouldn't affect the transferred data too much, and the bandwidth is almost exactly what we need.
- fragmede 2y ago
  with a hex editor, I wonder how many bytes it would take to input a binary program that output the data to the screen as a series of black and white images, like a QR code but not. So you wouldn't be trying to OCR characters which has the problems mentioned, but you'd have to get the program into it first.
- jtriangle 2y ago
og2023 2y ago
You could have made photographs of the hex representation right from the screen with a modern smartphone, recognize them through the built in into the camera app software and call it a day.
brisketbbq 2y ago
I think I would have just pulled out my audio recorder and played the file on the computer. The files were very small and recorded with the internal mic on the computer, so it's not as though these are high quality recordings, they're more sentimental to whoever owned the laptop.
asveikau 2y ago
I wonder how hard it would be to track down a dock. Googling around, it seems like the dock has nubus slots, which would mean you could add ethernet. From there, I remember running ssh and scp on classic macs, so that is theoretically possible. Getting those old clients to talk with modern sshd might be tough. I feel like I would attempt that, or perhaps floppies, before what this person did...
jesprenj 2y ago
OP could search-and-replace all Ds in Word with something more understandable by the OCR, maybe a period, before faxing the document. Or maybe convert every hex character into two characters from the set .0-|, doubling page count.
qalmakka 2y ago
> we weren't confident the old file system (HFS) would be easy to read from a modern system. AFAIK modern Linux is still able to properly read from HFS and HFS+. I mounted a MacOS 9 disk image just a few days ago.
Sprotch 2y ago
Those games brought back some memories…. Escape Velocity was such an awesome game!
telegtron 2y ago
Was it not an option to take out the HD and connect it to a modern computer? It sure had an HD. [0] [0] Macintosh PowerBook Duo 280c: Technical Specifications https://support.apple.com/en-us/112137 https://support.apple.com/en-us/112137
- flounder3 2y ago
  On the very first page: The internal hard drive uses SCSI with an unusual connector. 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.
  - telegtron 2y ago
    Oops! I forgot I read that part. You are right.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Felger 2y ago
I recovered a post apo novel written like 30 years ago by a friend last year. Patient : Miniscribe 8425SA 20 MB SCSI hard disk from an Apple Hard Disk 20SC (external SCSI enclosure with a HDD). Hoped the disk was still in working condition after more than a decade stored (HDD was built in '88 and a sticker mentioned a repair in '99), the enclosure power supply was presumed dead (no power on) and the mac itself was shorting mains power in a few little minutes, probably from the screen high voltage converter dying and shorting. I simply extracted the hard disk from the enclosure. This full height 3.5" disk has an "external" mechanical actuator : a stepper motor visible from outside drives the arm with the head(s) inside the disk, protected by a bellows. It gives a cool sort of a floppy drive sound when random access occurs. I simply plugged it on a SCSI chain on my vintage Advansys SCSI PCI Card and ribbons. Read the HFS partition with an old recovery software I could find on the recovery computer, quickly found the files (very simple file system and hierarchy), recovered them on the PC. Encountered just one bad sector. Then looked the content of the file as raw shaking and ajusted the recovered text format for use with Windows PC/Word from the old word processor software - I think they were Corel Wordperfect files. Very few correction to make to the raw text. Layout will have to be more thoroughly restored beyond EOL. Mainly accented characters and a few other replacements to do. I thought it would be more of an chore from an vintage apple system and third party software. Overall, it was far easier than expected. Took me less than 2 hours. But am a ex data recovery guy with some ressources. Quite pleased the miniscribe acted almost like a charm after 10 years or so of (warm, indoor) storage and not a single power on. Feared the HDD motor's ball bearing were totaly stuck !
userbinator 2y ago
I have hard drives a little older than that, which work just fine with an IDE-SATA adapter. It looks like 2.5" SCSI adapters do exist, although they are much rarer: https://vintagemacmuseum.com/reading-powerbook-2-5-scsi-hard-drives/ https://vintagemacmuseum.com/reading-powerbook-2-5-scsi-hard...
ggm 2y ago
Years ago bootstrapping 4.1BSD on a vax730 (a very mini variant of the 11/780) all I had was single disk removable rl02 type platters. And had to do a sequence of dd seek= Commands to split a 1200 bpi tape read ona larger machine nto chunks, write to the pack as a raw bits to read off, and reassemble as a boot structure to install from.
kristopolous 2y ago
people have done floppy<->SD card emulators for over a decade such as here (https://jimatwood.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/sd-card-hxc-floppy-emulator-for-roland-w-30-s-330-samplers/ https://jimatwood.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/sd-card-hxc-flopp...) It'd take a bit of work but you could probably just go straight to USB and maybe even have some file system trickery where you misreport the amount of "free space" as the host os copies to the "1.44MB" floppy basically by opportunistically "removing and freeing" sectors from the virtual disk transparently, essentially always reporting 1.44MB. It's such a dirty and beautiful hack if it would work. If I were doing this, this is essentially the only approach I'd actually be interested in.
ganesmo 2y ago
I would suggest you to tap the inputs to the speaker to get preout equivalent of audio signal using audio transformers that support the input impedance equal to the speaker impedance. Once pre out is achieved, then it is easy to record
musicale 2y ago
I like the idea of using a SCSI adapter or cable and then making a hard drive image, which can then be booted in an emulator or mounted in Linux (or NetBSD, or older MacOS?) using the hfs filesystem. Could also use hfstools. Making a localtalk adapter is also a cool idea. There seem to be localtalk implementations (tashtalk) for PIC microcontrollers. Someone even made a localtalk-wifi gateway.
- twelvechairs 2y ago
  Yeah. A quick google says this uses a HDI30 plug, you can get a converter from this to scsi plug cheaply and another from scsi to usb. Then you just mount it in Linux. I'd imagine that's by far the easiest and most complete route.
isoprophlex 2y ago
A (lossy) fix for the bad OCR giving glitched PCM data would be to do a median sliding window filter. Not 100% accurate, but it would probably be good enough...
kilianinbox 2y ago
there is a screen and speaker :) mobiles have mic and cam.. and we can write a C or any oldschool that can transfer data to screen or speaker :) noisy ! no need to physically serial floppy disk things
johnklos 2y ago
> The internal hard drive uses SCSI with an unusual connector. Adapting it didn't seem straightforward[...] I suppose the author hasn't heard of eBay. The adapter is $15. > The laptop has an AppleTalk port and a phone jack... but no networking software installed. The author may have some search engine problems if they can't figure out that Macs have had networking software built in for ages, and that a PowerBook is too new to run any Mac OS that doesn't have networking :P Transferring data via FAX is cool and job well done, but the other things really don't fit with a clever solution.
- ajross 2y ago
  Started typing almost exactly this comment before checking to see if anyone else had. Absolutely. I guarantee that for any "old hardware" need there's a geek expert selling recovery/compatibility/adaptation hardware. These problems have all been solved, albeit not at a level of "take it into a repair shop" convenience. Just as a point of general archival best practices: old spinning media are extremely fragile. Your goal should be to image the drive exactly once, before doing anything else. Once that completes, everything amounts to a pure software problem you can solve at your convenience. But insisting on booting that drive repeatedly trying to "recover" it is a good way to break it forever. Also: > The internal hard drive uses SCSI with an unusual connector. 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. Yeah, that's silly. You can literally mount that drive image on a vanilla linux box.
lemoncucumber 2y ago
Like others have said, AppleTalk is the right way to solve this. But if we’re going with crazy hacks, I bet one could emulate an ADB keyboard to copy binaries onto the laptop by sending keystrokes to “type” hex into ResEdit.
rurban 2y ago
I would have compressed it with some kind of Reed-Solomon (ARC, RAR,...) and sent this hexdump instead per fax. Much shorter (audio is extremely compressable) and with additional OCR hints in the RS decoder. Even a trivial CRC check per block or line would be better than nothing
olddragon2a 2y ago
Brings back a memory of doing a similar transfer with two systems that refused to communicate with each other. Had to install a printer driver long ago. The computer wasn't on the network and refused all media including connecting another hard drive directly. It did have a 300 baud modem though. Took an entire weekend to bounce the 11 something megabyte driver over to it through a BBS I emailed the driver to.
SillyUsername 2y ago
I'd have got the floppy working. It's highly likely a short, perhaps a bent pin, if it's failing to start with it connected, or possibly just some duff caps.
cycomanic 2y ago
Those artifacts in the audio file should be trivial to correct, I suspect even a super simple outlier detection script would have worked. Should have been much easier than optimising the OCR (not to disparage the effort).
ThePowerOfFuet 2y ago
Faxing a hexdump then OCRing it,.instead of sending the file itself by Xmodem/Zmodem?
rnitchy 2y ago
o shoot. i see Lode Runner, the legend returns on there!! Some great times as a kid playing that
ChoGGi 2y ago
If you can find it, there's an adapter for the drive https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/adtx-scsi-ide-2-5-inch-adapter-compatibility-and-performance.45713/ https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/adtx-scsi-ide-2-5-in...
kkfx 2y ago
Hum, a 30-years-old laptop without a serial port? Because a usb-serial on a modern machine, a null-modem cable, kermit/gtkterm/minicom/* and passing data it's much easier...
vorticalbox 2y ago
Would opening the laptop and attaching an audio jack the speaker wires have worked?
- declan_roberts 2y ago
  Yes, but a lossy copy.
  - 0l 2y ago
    Why would it have to be lossy? There are lots of modulation methods for digital data over an analog carrier.
Terretta 2y ago
"Think Alert Sound" I see in the dialog box -- is that the "I'm trying to think but nothing happens!" error message alert sound popular on Macs of that era? (We had that sound in the office, and many more.) The sound I recall is the last phrase in 3stooges05.mp3 from here: https://www.barbneal.com/the-collection/tv-shows/the-three-stooges/ https://www.barbneal.com/the-collection/tv-shows/the-three-s... Everyone's talking about the way to connect to the Mac, I'm just wondering if it's easier get the sound sources the Mac sounds the person wants were made from.
- netsharc 2y ago
  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.
  - Terretta 2y ago
    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).
    - netsharc 2y ago
      Yes I said phrase. Audacity can zoom in...
fsckboy 2y ago
>The internal hard drive uses SCSI with an unusual connector. Adapting it didn't seem straightforward this was the way: SCSI is a bus mastering protocol which allows multiple masters to share the bus, which means you can plug two computers into the same SCSI bus at the same time and they will both be able to share access the disk device. You wouldn't want to rely on simultaneous access to the file system, but the entire disk from those days would be just a large file today and you could just dump the whole thing (the inconsistencies in the open file system would be like recovering from a crash, and none of the long term files would be affected) > and we weren't confident the old file system (HFS) would be easy to read from a modern system. the nice thing about opensource/New Jersey style is that that old HFS would be completely easy to mount loopback on linux I still have a complete disk image of my old Mac SE20 from 1988, and I still mount it up from time to time, and I pulled it off my old mac through the scsi bus. I believe the 20 referred to the MHz of the 68020 processor, but it also coincidentally had a 20MB disk, as was the case for the SE30 that came out the following year. > Deus fax machina: While the laptop has no networking software, it does have fax software ... The first question was how to turn the audio file into something faxable. this reminds me of an old idea I had that I never pursued. Back in the days of fax there was generally a cover sheet for tracking/delivery of faxes in an office environment, but which seemed like a waste of paper/modem time to me who was never in a big org situation. To cut to the chase for my idea, I thought it would be cool to transmit something like a large QR code on the coversheet, which would be an encoding of the document you were sending in .DOC (ms-word) format. That way, you could fax to a fax machine, but if the recipient was a computer modem it could receive the document in original format, and abort (via handshake) the rest of the fax transmission. I thought it would be a gentle way to transition past "obsolete" fax technology.
mbreese 2y ago
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?
- p0seidon 2y ago
  Had exactly the same thought.
- gizajob 2y ago
  I had this brainwave and basically duped your comment before I’d scrolled down to read it…
- hypercube33 2y ago
  A laptop of this age should have a serial port. It's possible even with something like Win95 to run a null modem and tcp/IP over that and SMB to copy files to a semi modern OS.
- Evidlo 2y ago
  He says he tried multiple font sizes.
- tfvlrue 2y ago
  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.
  - Maxion 2y ago
    Did you try seeing how well ChatGPT was at OCRing the images? Though since it is HEX characters it might not do so good. I've found it to be very reliable at OCRin e.g. photos of receipts.
PreInternet01 2y ago
Well, the source site seems to be hosted on an 30-year-old laptop, and therefore unavailable (even trough archive.org), but here we go: -If you ever encounter a situation where "well, this volume might contain valuable data" is a thing, try to make a forensically-sound copy first; -Depending on the exact source media, this might be a very specific process. Don't skip on it, though. But, once you have an accurate copy of the source media, feel free to run any non-destructive experiments that you'd like. After, of course, publishing the source media for fellow enthousiasts...
- tfvlrue 2y ago
  > the source site seems to be hosted on an 30-year-old laptop You're not too far off :) It's actually hosted on super cheap shared VPS with only 768MB of RAM and a single CPU core. This is the first time it's seen any real heavy traffic, and all considered I think it did pretty well with such limited resources. I did a little postmortem investigation and, surprisingly, it wasn't CPU-bound. A low memory condition killed the database service a couple times. It looks like PHP-FPM was set to scale too aggressively. For the future I've reduced the number of workers it can spawn. Server administration is not my specialty, so this was a fun learning experience!
  - lawrenceyan 2y ago
    Wow! That’s efficiency right there. I’m pretty sure you can get a device with those specs for <$10 today. Good job.
- chedabob 2y ago
  Someone managed to snag a copy: http://web.archive.org/web/20240531155301/https://www.unterminated.com/random-fun/how-to-copy-a-file-from-a-30-year-old-laptop http://web.archive.org/web/20240531155301/https://www.unterm...
axus 2y ago
Good story, I liked how they were almost thwarted by FCC fax regulations.
- jeffhuys 2y ago
  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…
duxup 2y ago
The phone line simulator was very impressive. I likely would have given up several times and just played the audio on the laptop and tried capturing it with another device (my phone) over the air.
- tantalor 2y ago
  I'd try cracking open the laptop and intercepting the audio signal before it goes to the built-in speaker
kleiba 2y ago
If you have OCR in the loop anyway, you could have just taken a picture of the file as displayed on the original laptop, no need to do the fax transfer.
- kelnos 2y ago
  Right. Fax is a terrible, crappy protocol that generates pretty bad images on the receiving side, even when you have clean phone lines. I wouldn't be surprised if a modern camera-phone photo of the screen displaying the text would yield a better image.
- chem83 2y ago
  Also, replace the ambiguous characters like D/0 or 3/8 to something a bit more recognizable like D becomes d and 8 becomes X and then do a find-replace after the OCR process. Was there really a need to write the OCR software from scratch?
sed3 2y ago
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.
- ralphc 2y ago
  According to everymac.com it has a serial port but macs had odd port shapes that need a special cable.
novagameco 2y ago
Did the laptop not have any kind of serial port to write to?
thrtythreeforty 2y ago
Is a fax implicitly an analog transmission? Or is there a digital data stream somewhere beneath the layer sending the photo that could be used like a modem?
- Evidlo 2y ago
  Digital bitmapped images over an analog channel.
- utensil4778 2y ago
  Very, very old faxes used to be purely analog. Since dial-up was invented, however, faxes are fully digital. If you've ever used a fax machine, you'll notice the classic dial-up handshake noises. Faxes are modems and vice-versa: any PC with a modem could send and receive faxes. It was a commonly advertised feature back in the day.
ruslan 2y ago
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_powerbook_duo280c.html#macspecs2 https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook_duo/specs/mac_p...
- gcp123 2y ago
  Yes, it had those ports. Just like Kevin McCallister could've called the police in Home Alone, I think the author preferred this to become an extraordinary story more than the simplest possible solve.
- perakojotgenije 2y ago
  That's the first thing that came to my mind. I remember connecting two laptops using LPT or COM cable and transferring files using norton commander (if I remember correctly) 30 years ago.
- rvense 2y ago
  Apple used 8-pin mini DIN connectors for serial. The author might not have had the right cable.
  - hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
    A Farallon EtherWave provides Ethernet directly.
  - ruslan 2y ago
    There are plenty of mini-DIN connectors and serial cables for mac on ebay. You need just three wires for serial line to work. I would strip the wires and plug them in without any connector. :)
  - inferiorhuman 2y ago
    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.
anthk 2y ago
If you can fax I'm sure you can do some zmodem/ymodem.
gist 2y ago
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. Honestly that reason didn't make any sense to me at all. The other way might be interesting and fun but I don't think this is a reason not to attempt mounting the old file system. https://www.matthewhughes.co.uk/how-to-mount-hfs-classic-drives-on-macos-catalina-and-later/ https://www.matthewhughes.co.uk/how-to-mount-hfs-classic-dri...
- anthk 2y ago
  Linux will mount HFS drivers and files like nothing... This setup it's overcomplicated and hackey, but dumb in the end. You can mount old SCSI drivers with modern adaptors just fine, and Linux/BSD will either mount or extract HFS images with unar (I think) or hfsutils/hfstools. Or just spawn ymodem/zmodem compatible software (as he used a Fax setup for modem) and the problem would be solved in minutes.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    Also it's a 30 year old Apple laptop - there are tons of resources available on how to do things with them. But, this worked with what he had at the time, so, eh, fun times.
- elaus 2y ago
  I sympathize with the notion to fix things in software instead of buying hardware (an SCSI adapter): You have to spend money, wait for it to arrive (or even leave the house to get it yourself!) and it's one more future plastic waste. If fiddling around and getting creative is something one enjoys (and has the time to do so), doing things like OP did is a nice alternative :)
  - ssl-3 2y ago
    Used cables exist on platforms like eBay. (They can also be resold on eBay after they're done being used.)
chasil 2y ago
In my younger years, I had to pull a dBase 2 database off a CP/M desktop into an MS-DOS portable. I ended up configuring a serial cable, and running PROCOMM on the PC, set 9600/n/8/1 on both ports, then printed from dBase 2 and set PROCOMM to record the session to a file. It would lose characters if I let it run too long without a pause to write to a floppy, so I would ctrl-s/q on the CP/M side. I guess nobody else had ever figured out how to do this.
- ruslan 2y ago
  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.
  - chasil 2y ago
    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 ports, which is the first choice in pulling data off of them (including binary data with XMODEM and its variants).
    - ruslan 2y ago
      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.
      - Symbiote 2y ago
        Looks like it's the MODE command: https://home.csulb.edu/~murdock/mode.html https://home.csulb.edu/~murdock/mode.html
  - 2y ago
m_herrlich 2y ago
Jeez, no floppy drive on this laptop? How did people install stuff back then? But thanks, this is inspirational :)
- zbentley 2y ago
  It had one, but the author mentioned that the drive's hardware had failed.
mrunkel 2y ago
DB9 serial to USB Null modem cable + some simple file transfer software would have solved this in minutes. Since the mac had a built-in modem, you could have used that software to transfer the file via xmodem or ymodem protocol. I guess this isn't common knowledge any more.
- meffie 2y ago
  Should we tell them about fidonet too?
  - ruslan 2y ago
    Knowing about Fidonet is too much. But a little bit of UUCP definitely won't hurt. ;)
qiqitori 2y ago
> 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 problem by writing a tool to help verify the OCR result. Basically you input the OCR'd result and segment the numbers. It'll display the original segmented characters ordered by their class, and the human eye will very quickly find any chars that do not belong, e.g. 3s sorted under "8" etc. https://blog.qiqitori.com/2023/03/ocring-hex-dumps-or-other-monospace-text-and-verifying-the-result/ https://blog.qiqitori.com/2023/03/ocring-hex-dumps-or-other-... https://blog.qiqitori.com/2023/03/ai-day-in-retroland-prolog-on-the-commodore-vic-20-needs-expanded-ram/ https://blog.qiqitori.com/2023/03/ai-day-in-retroland-prolog... I wrote two blog posts about this, and the tools are also linked from the blog posts. Note: the tools are just slightly more user-friendly than sendmail. That said, I don't know if these old Apple laptops came with anything resembling a programming environment (or at least that ancient version of Microsoft Word?), but even if not... There must be a better way (even without hardware hacking)!
- OptionOfT 2y ago
  This reminds me of an OCR application I used for converting PGS subs to SRT. It would show you words/letters grouped together and you had to approve / correct its translation.
- jdthedisciple 2y ago
  > 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 feel like this could be trivially solved by plugging an LLM to the OCR output with the sole task to correct spelling errors like that. That's pretty much one of the tasks LLMs should excell the most at.
  - 2y ago
theideaofcoffee 2y ago
He 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.
- JSR_FDED 2y ago
  That was my first thought too!
- mdorazio 2y ago
  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.
josephcsible 2y ago
> Oops. The FCC says I need a cover page. Let's try to appease them. Yet another reason I hate when things I own try to enforce laws against me: there will be cases, like the author's, in which the law doesn't apply but the thing doesn't know it.
wannacboatmovie 2y ago
If it had "fax software" it almost certainly had terminal emulator software whereby one could use something like ZMODEM and not corrupting the files in the process. This was painful to read, like using a butter knife as a precision screwdriver.
WalterBright 2y ago
In the olden days, we transferred files using the RS232 serial port between computers that had no compatible media.
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btbuildem 2y ago
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 speakers, recorded on the recipient machine, and decoded it back to binary form there.
- coolcoder613 2y ago
  This "binary data" already is audio. The author did not want to do that because of the loss of fidelity.
  - btbuildem 2y ago
    Seems like I didn't get the idea across clearly. While audio files are binary data, they're encoded in a specific way, and use specific playback codecs to render that binary into data suitable for playback by soundcard chipsets. Back, way back in the day (but not as far back as punch cards, but before diskettes), binary streams were persisted to tape. Not the backup tape used today, but regular audio cassettes. The data was converted into an audio stream, similar in nature to what you'd hear during a modem handshake. On the receiving end, the audio stream was decoded back into binary data, without any loss (well, given the robustness of error correction back then, sometimes you'd have to try again). The key point being, the audio was just a transport layer for binary data, which could have been anything -- images, code, text, audio files, etc.
  - kortex 2y ago
    Sounds like GP is suggesting digitally encoding/modulating the audio bitstream, like using the speaker as a modem. Which would be far less lossy than trying to record the analog signal.
  - anthk 2y ago
    Minimodem using 1200 BPS with Opus@64KBPS it's pretty usable, the file doesn't get very huge.
t0mek 2y ago
A 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. [1] https://blog.rekawek.eu/2016/12/08/mac-plus#hard-drive https://blog.rekawek.eu/2016/12/08/mac-plus#hard-drive [2] https://bluescsi.com/ https://bluescsi.com/
- Agingcoder 2y ago
  I dreamt of Zip drives back in the days - I never quite understood white they didn’t become standard, much like usb drives would become later.
  - fluentbyfire 2y ago
    Zip drives malfunctioned too much. The "click of death" they used to call it.
  - WoodenChair 2y ago
    They sorta did in the Apple world. Maybe not quite a standard, but quite common. Apple shipped several Macs with (optionally) built-in Zip drives in the late 1990s.
  - kalleboo 2y ago
    They were proprietary and made by only one company. So there was a bit of a battle between Zip, SyQuest and LS120 ("SuperDisk") What I don't get is why Magneto-Optical didn't take off. 3.5" disks that were essentially MiniDisc but not proprietary (there were drives and disks from several manufacturers), faster than Zip, and eventually got upgraded to over 1 GB capacity disks. They were huge in Japan where they became a de-facto standard, but mostly unheard of in the rest of the world.
endgame 2y ago
The fax is a good trick, but my favourite story of this type involves a hand-written hex editor and many, many, hours of copying bytes by hand: http://www.oocities.org/zztexpert/docs/upoprgv4.html http://www.oocities.org/zztexpert/docs/upoprgv4.html
- semi 2y ago
  interesting story but i really wonder why he wrote it out with pencil and paper rather than directly typing it into the other computer.
Brajeshwar 2y ago
Wow! That was an exciting read. It was way too complex for my limited knowledge of computers. 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.
- cornholio 2y ago
  Sounds like an IBM Portable PC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Portable_Personal_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Portable_Personal_Computer Although the screen on that would have been somewhat larger than a 3.5" floppy (and it didn't even come with 3.5 floppies, just 5.25). You could find a smaller screen on the Osborne 1 and other early 80s portables, but they wouldn't have run DOS. PC Convertible is another option: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_Convertible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_Convertible
kk6mrp 2y ago
Did you get Doom on it the same way?
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jorgelbg 2y ago
Immediately took me back to the scene from Firewall (2006) when Harrison Ford is copying the account data with an iPod and a fax machine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J13jKfVH01o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J13jKfVH01o ^_^.
- charbuff 2y ago
  What an epic save. I have a few laptops and harddrives that I have been wanting to convert for years, and this motivates me again to try since I know that they're a bunch of ide and nvme connectors, nothing near the hoops the author had to jump through.
cabirum 2y ago
Does it have a working C compiler? May have tried hacking together a data-over-audio app. Or quickly steam a bunch of qr codes.
- rusk 2y ago
  Probably not
dewfaced 2y ago
Was Appletalk not installed? It just used a apple printer cable to do networking, this is how I played Warcraft II back in the day.
gumby 2y ago
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.
goda90 2y ago
I 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.
jandrese 2y ago
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.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  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.
  - jandrese 2y ago
    Ah, that makes sense. The problem with the Appletalk to Ethernet adapter is that would definitely need drivers that are unlikely to exist on the Mac. Given that, then using the serial port with a dumb terminal would be the next best option, but IIRC MacOS didn't ship with a terminal application so there's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. What might exist is an Appletalk implementation for the GPIO ports on a Raspberry Pi or similar board, which would let you use the built-in Appletalk file sharing to get stuff on and off of the machine. The retrocomputing scene has to have something like that, it would be extremely useful.
1970-01-01 2y ago
You can also print it: http://ollydbg.de/Paperbak/#1 http://ollydbg.de/Paperbak/#1
Suppafly 2y ago
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.
- ska 2y ago
  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.
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    I suppose it depends on how fast you needed a solution too, getting an adapter for the hard drive probably would have been the easiest method even if you had to wait a week for one to come from ebay. Likewise, a replacement floppy drive could have been purchased too. Overall OP came up with a workable solution that didn't really require much in the way of purchases, and it might help someone else out in the future, it's just so strange.
eviks 2y ago
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?
ska 2y ago
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...
mongol 2y ago
Didn't it have 3.5" floppy disk?
- giantrobot 2y ago
  The Duos did not have internal floppy drives. They had external floppies that used the docking port. Or you'd use a floppy in a big Duo Dock. This was not uncommon in the mid-90s for a smaller laptop.
mysteria 2y ago
Since these are audio recordings an easier hardware approach would be to tap the output of the motherboard's D/A converter right before the speaker amp and capture it with an A/D. You could also tap the speaker wires which should be easier than tapping thin SMD traces, though the signal might have been highpassed before amplication to better support the small laptop speakers. Of course this means you'll have to disassemble the ancient laptop and all that, and it won't be a bitperfect capture. For voice recordings though the quality should be more than adequate.

607 points by tfvlrue 2y ago

ResEdit... now that's a name I hadn't heard in a long time. ResEdit was really a fantastic tool to do all sorts of tinkering. Too bad pretty much all Mac software is signed now, so this kind of tinkering isn't possible any more.

Amorymeltzer 2y ago
Quite a memory. I'm fairly certain that using ResEdit to modify and create plug-ins for Escape Velocity: Nova (the sequel to EV Override in the games folder here) is what first got me interested in programming.

metalliqaz 2y ago

If you're just doing OCR you could have taken photos of the screen, right?

devit 2y ago

Seems far easier to figure out the hard drive connector and find software that can read the filesystem.

hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
Of the era, it's probably Apple proprietary connector sort of like IDE but maybe not.

MarkusWandel 2y ago

I keep an old USB-to-SCSI adapter cable handy for this sort of challenge. In general, I hoard any USB-to-X adapters that I come across (RS232, parallel printer port, USB floppy drive, USB optical drive). Of course if you don't have the right SCSI cable that may not be worth the effort in this case.

morsch 2y ago
Which SCSI? There's like five for just old school parallel SCSI.
kosma 2y ago
Hold onto it, these things are incredibly rare.

irusensei 2y ago

Uh... Laplink serial cable?

mmmlinux 2y ago

raspberry pi with serial and localtalk. done.

Dwedit 2y ago

Upon reading the headline, my guess for how to copy a file off would involve a Parallel-port ZIP drive on the old computer, then using a USB ZIP drive on the modern computer. Or a USB disk enclosure that uses IDE. Now I'll go read the article... Oh, it's about a Mac...

andix 2y ago

If it was an old DOS/Windows laptop, you could just use INTERLNK via COM or parallel port. I have to post that, it's just such a nostalgic memory copying files like that. So if somebody needs to do it: Dosbox + USB-RS232 adapter and the right cable. INTERLNK/SRV was included with DOS 6.0 and later, so it's rather easy to find.

amelius 2y ago

> The laptop has no audio jacks, so we couldn't get good analog copies of the recordings even if we wanted to. How about directly connecting a DSO to the speaker terminals?

pradmatic 2y ago

One of the coolest articles I’ve read lately. Thanks for sharing!

StillBored 2y ago

Appletalk is the way to go, the drivers are built in and apple did a good job of maintaining compatibility over a long timeframe. I have similar issues moving stuff between a IIGS and modern machines. Its possible to move stuff with floppy emulators, via scsi , or just raw serial, but the simplicity of having a Mac with both appletalk and ethernet, allows one to drag and drop entire file hierarchies between the target appletalk based machine and a SMB/etc share from the machine in the middle. Also SCSI tends to be easy to convert if one knows the drive connector/type, and is willing to chain a couple adapters. I'm sure that is the case here too, the 2.5" scsi drives were a form of SCA connectors IIRC, SCSI adapters exist for almost anything to anything as long as the single ended vs differential rules are followed, newer ultra differential adapters could usually fall back to 8 bit single ended allowing them to drive just about everything. The problem is going to be finding an OS/etc that can real the old mac filesystems although I'm guessing one of the utilities to read raw images (of which i'm failing to remember the ones Ive used in the past) could probably read/write the raw disk image.

kelnos 2y ago
> Appletalk is the way to go, the drivers are built in The article author claims the networking software wasn't installed, though. > Also SCSI tends to be easy to convert if one knows the drive connector/type, and is willing to chain a couple adapters. I was thinking this too. And the author also says they didn't believe they'd be able to read the HFS volume, but Linux has had an HFS driver for... decades?... at this point.
- adrianmonk 2y ago
  I assume they must have meant it doesn't have any TCP/IP networking software installed. As I recall, Macs had AppleTalk hardware from the very beginning and AppleTalk software was a built-in part of Mac OS. I don't know if it's even possible to remove if you tried.
- Sprotch 2y ago
  Appletalk was installed by default in all Macs of that era - the author is talking about TCP/IP

PhasmaFelis 2y ago

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 that 8x6 glob of pixels is a 0 or a D. Hmmm. If nothing else, what about search-and-replacing the Word doc to replace some of the most difficult characters with clearer ones, and then reversing the process on the other end? I mean, that's ridiculously complex, but not as complex as writing a custom Fax to Binary Converter app.

tfvlrue 2y ago
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 like barely-legible blobs. The Fax-to-Binary converter isn't doing anything particularly complicated with the image, just breaking it up into an accurately-aligned grid and hashing the pixel data of each tile. Replacing the characters in the document hadn't occurred to me at the time! It's a good idea, but for my programmer brain, writing this software was the easier (and more fun) solution :)
- steve1977 2y ago
  Just out of curiosity, would that old Mac OS have had OCR A or OCR B fonts available? (pretty sure Windows would have). These were essentially designed for OCR (duh...)
  - tfvlrue 2y ago
    Nope, not that I found. The set of fonts installed was _very_ limited. I can't remember the exact count, but I think it was less than 20. Nothing specialized like an OCR font.

gizajob 2y ago

What about pointing a camera at the screen and then paging through all the numbers on the Mac while capturing images?? Then you could OCR the numbers directly on the capturing laptop rather than trying to convert sound back into text. 10/10 for ingenuity anyway using the fax port.

sponaugle 2y ago
I was thinking the same thing. A camera capture would be fast and accurate if you were going to ocr.

RIMR 2y ago

This is a neat trick and all, but if you could find the Duo Dock, it has a SCSI port on it to connect a second hard drive.

skeaker 2y ago

Maybe I missed it, but it seems the actual sound file that was transferred wasn't included in the post... A shame, since all that buildup had me wondering what the file was!

causality0 2y ago

How do you transfer files off an Apple laptop from 1994? It's harder than it sounds! Somewhat misleading. It would have been trivial if the laptop didn't have multiple hardware faults.

ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
To be expected from a 30 year old laptop no?
- causality0 2y ago
  Sure, but it makes it sound like the laptop being old is what creates the problem, when it's the laptop being busted that's the problem.

notorandit 2y ago

Video hex display and camera recording...

j45 2y ago

Creative way to transfer a file. Could just use a serial cable on one end, and USB->serial or parallel port cable that could transfer files with the software to allow file transfers easily.

jeffbee 2y ago

Something is a little off about the statements regarding the rarity of HTTP in 1994. I didn't know anyone with a Mac that lacked Mosaic (or, later, Netscape) and NCSA Telnet.

kjellsbells 2y ago

This feels like a practical exam in information theory, and I love it. "You've got a 32,000 byte file to transmit over a channel of your choice. They all suck in some way. You have a smartphone, a serial port, and a computer. The computer has no compiler, but you can use any of its native facilities. Solutions that require more bytes of input (eg scripts) than are in the file to be transferred are disqualified. There is no time limit, but the fastest solution wins. Go." Given this is an old Mac, Im not sure I could have outdone the author. Although I was tempted by the notion that if you could replace visually similar chars like 3 and 8 with something very distinct (eg 8 with Z), then using a smartphone to capture the screen and OCR might be the fastest path of all. I think System 7 had AppleScript so perhaps that sed-like step is possible?

anal_reactor 2y ago
OCR from smartphone camera could easily make mistakes that would be difficult to detect and correct. What I would do is look for some kind of encoding that makes errors extremely unlikely. If I had to dump the entire laptop's drive, I'd rather leave the laptop running for a week once than use a faster method that introduces errors. I don't know much about error correction, so let's take naive approach. 320MB (drive size) in a week is 530 bytes per second. I don't know what's the screen refresh rate (and reaction time) but it's sensible to assume that if we display any image at 4Hz and record it with a smartphone, we won't miss frames or have any other funny artifacts. So it's like 135 bytes per frame, which is 1080 bits. If we divide the 8.4 inch 640x480 screen into squares 16 by 16 pixels, then we have 1000 squares 0.5 by 0.5cm. If each square is either black or white for 0.25 seconds, then camera artifacts shouldn't affect the transferred data too much, and the bandwidth is almost exactly what we need.
fragmede 2y ago
with a hex editor, I wonder how many bytes it would take to input a binary program that output the data to the screen as a series of black and white images, like a QR code but not. So you wouldn't be trying to OCR characters which has the problems mentioned, but you'd have to get the program into it first.
jtriangle 2y ago

og2023 2y ago

You could have made photographs of the hex representation right from the screen with a modern smartphone, recognize them through the built in into the camera app software and call it a day.

brisketbbq 2y ago

I think I would have just pulled out my audio recorder and played the file on the computer. The files were very small and recorded with the internal mic on the computer, so it's not as though these are high quality recordings, they're more sentimental to whoever owned the laptop.

asveikau 2y ago

I wonder how hard it would be to track down a dock. Googling around, it seems like the dock has nubus slots, which would mean you could add ethernet. From there, I remember running ssh and scp on classic macs, so that is theoretically possible. Getting those old clients to talk with modern sshd might be tough. I feel like I would attempt that, or perhaps floppies, before what this person did...

jesprenj 2y ago

OP could search-and-replace all Ds in Word with something more understandable by the OCR, maybe a period, before faxing the document. Or maybe convert every hex character into two characters from the set .0-|, doubling page count.

qalmakka 2y ago

> we weren't confident the old file system (HFS) would be easy to read from a modern system. AFAIK modern Linux is still able to properly read from HFS and HFS+. I mounted a MacOS 9 disk image just a few days ago.

Sprotch 2y ago

Those games brought back some memories…. Escape Velocity was such an awesome game!

telegtron 2y ago

Was it not an option to take out the HD and connect it to a modern computer? It sure had an HD. [0] [0] Macintosh PowerBook Duo 280c: Technical Specifications https://support.apple.com/en-us/112137 https://support.apple.com/en-us/112137

flounder3 2y ago
On the very first page: The internal hard drive uses SCSI with an unusual connector. 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.
- telegtron 2y ago
  Oops! I forgot I read that part. You are right.
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Felger 2y ago

I recovered a post apo novel written like 30 years ago by a friend last year. Patient : Miniscribe 8425SA 20 MB SCSI hard disk from an Apple Hard Disk 20SC (external SCSI enclosure with a HDD). Hoped the disk was still in working condition after more than a decade stored (HDD was built in '88 and a sticker mentioned a repair in '99), the enclosure power supply was presumed dead (no power on) and the mac itself was shorting mains power in a few little minutes, probably from the screen high voltage converter dying and shorting. I simply extracted the hard disk from the enclosure. This full height 3.5" disk has an "external" mechanical actuator : a stepper motor visible from outside drives the arm with the head(s) inside the disk, protected by a bellows. It gives a cool sort of a floppy drive sound when random access occurs. I simply plugged it on a SCSI chain on my vintage Advansys SCSI PCI Card and ribbons. Read the HFS partition with an old recovery software I could find on the recovery computer, quickly found the files (very simple file system and hierarchy), recovered them on the PC. Encountered just one bad sector. Then looked the content of the file as raw shaking and ajusted the recovered text format for use with Windows PC/Word from the old word processor software - I think they were Corel Wordperfect files. Very few correction to make to the raw text. Layout will have to be more thoroughly restored beyond EOL. Mainly accented characters and a few other replacements to do. I thought it would be more of an chore from an vintage apple system and third party software. Overall, it was far easier than expected. Took me less than 2 hours. But am a ex data recovery guy with some ressources. Quite pleased the miniscribe acted almost like a charm after 10 years or so of (warm, indoor) storage and not a single power on. Feared the HDD motor's ball bearing were totaly stuck !

userbinator 2y ago

I have hard drives a little older than that, which work just fine with an IDE-SATA adapter. It looks like 2.5" SCSI adapters do exist, although they are much rarer: https://vintagemacmuseum.com/reading-powerbook-2-5-scsi-hard-drives/ https://vintagemacmuseum.com/reading-powerbook-2-5-scsi-hard...

ggm 2y ago

Years ago bootstrapping 4.1BSD on a vax730 (a very mini variant of the 11/780) all I had was single disk removable rl02 type platters. And had to do a sequence of dd seek= Commands to split a 1200 bpi tape read ona larger machine nto chunks, write to the pack as a raw bits to read off, and reassemble as a boot structure to install from.

kristopolous 2y ago

people have done floppy<->SD card emulators for over a decade such as here (https://jimatwood.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/sd-card-hxc-floppy-emulator-for-roland-w-30-s-330-samplers/ https://jimatwood.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/sd-card-hxc-flopp...) It'd take a bit of work but you could probably just go straight to USB and maybe even have some file system trickery where you misreport the amount of "free space" as the host os copies to the "1.44MB" floppy basically by opportunistically "removing and freeing" sectors from the virtual disk transparently, essentially always reporting 1.44MB. It's such a dirty and beautiful hack if it would work. If I were doing this, this is essentially the only approach I'd actually be interested in.

ganesmo 2y ago

I would suggest you to tap the inputs to the speaker to get preout equivalent of audio signal using audio transformers that support the input impedance equal to the speaker impedance. Once pre out is achieved, then it is easy to record

musicale 2y ago

I like the idea of using a SCSI adapter or cable and then making a hard drive image, which can then be booted in an emulator or mounted in Linux (or NetBSD, or older MacOS?) using the hfs filesystem. Could also use hfstools. Making a localtalk adapter is also a cool idea. There seem to be localtalk implementations (tashtalk) for PIC microcontrollers. Someone even made a localtalk-wifi gateway.

twelvechairs 2y ago
Yeah. A quick google says this uses a HDI30 plug, you can get a converter from this to scsi plug cheaply and another from scsi to usb. Then you just mount it in Linux. I'd imagine that's by far the easiest and most complete route.

isoprophlex 2y ago

A (lossy) fix for the bad OCR giving glitched PCM data would be to do a median sliding window filter. Not 100% accurate, but it would probably be good enough...

kilianinbox 2y ago

there is a screen and speaker :) mobiles have mic and cam.. and we can write a C or any oldschool that can transfer data to screen or speaker :) noisy ! no need to physically serial floppy disk things

johnklos 2y ago

> The internal hard drive uses SCSI with an unusual connector. Adapting it didn't seem straightforward[...] I suppose the author hasn't heard of eBay. The adapter is $15. > The laptop has an AppleTalk port and a phone jack... but no networking software installed. The author may have some search engine problems if they can't figure out that Macs have had networking software built in for ages, and that a PowerBook is too new to run any Mac OS that doesn't have networking :P Transferring data via FAX is cool and job well done, but the other things really don't fit with a clever solution.

ajross 2y ago
Started typing almost exactly this comment before checking to see if anyone else had. Absolutely. I guarantee that for any "old hardware" need there's a geek expert selling recovery/compatibility/adaptation hardware. These problems have all been solved, albeit not at a level of "take it into a repair shop" convenience. Just as a point of general archival best practices: old spinning media are extremely fragile. Your goal should be to image the drive exactly once, before doing anything else. Once that completes, everything amounts to a pure software problem you can solve at your convenience. But insisting on booting that drive repeatedly trying to "recover" it is a good way to break it forever. Also: > The internal hard drive uses SCSI with an unusual connector. 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. Yeah, that's silly. You can literally mount that drive image on a vanilla linux box.

lemoncucumber 2y ago

Like others have said, AppleTalk is the right way to solve this. But if we’re going with crazy hacks, I bet one could emulate an ADB keyboard to copy binaries onto the laptop by sending keystrokes to “type” hex into ResEdit.

rurban 2y ago

I would have compressed it with some kind of Reed-Solomon (ARC, RAR,...) and sent this hexdump instead per fax. Much shorter (audio is extremely compressable) and with additional OCR hints in the RS decoder. Even a trivial CRC check per block or line would be better than nothing

olddragon2a 2y ago

Brings back a memory of doing a similar transfer with two systems that refused to communicate with each other. Had to install a printer driver long ago. The computer wasn't on the network and refused all media including connecting another hard drive directly. It did have a 300 baud modem though. Took an entire weekend to bounce the 11 something megabyte driver over to it through a BBS I emailed the driver to.

SillyUsername 2y ago

I'd have got the floppy working. It's highly likely a short, perhaps a bent pin, if it's failing to start with it connected, or possibly just some duff caps.

cycomanic 2y ago

Those artifacts in the audio file should be trivial to correct, I suspect even a super simple outlier detection script would have worked. Should have been much easier than optimising the OCR (not to disparage the effort).

ThePowerOfFuet 2y ago

Faxing a hexdump then OCRing it,.instead of sending the file itself by Xmodem/Zmodem?

rnitchy 2y ago

o shoot. i see Lode Runner, the legend returns on there!! Some great times as a kid playing that

ChoGGi 2y ago

If you can find it, there's an adapter for the drive https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/adtx-scsi-ide-2-5-inch-adapter-compatibility-and-performance.45713/ https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/adtx-scsi-ide-2-5-in...

kkfx 2y ago

Hum, a 30-years-old laptop without a serial port? Because a usb-serial on a modern machine, a null-modem cable, kermit/gtkterm/minicom/* and passing data it's much easier...

vorticalbox 2y ago

Would opening the laptop and attaching an audio jack the speaker wires have worked?

declan_roberts 2y ago
Yes, but a lossy copy.
- 0l 2y ago
  Why would it have to be lossy? There are lots of modulation methods for digital data over an analog carrier.

Terretta 2y ago

"Think Alert Sound" I see in the dialog box -- is that the "I'm trying to think but nothing happens!" error message alert sound popular on Macs of that era? (We had that sound in the office, and many more.) The sound I recall is the last phrase in 3stooges05.mp3 from here: https://www.barbneal.com/the-collection/tv-shows/the-three-stooges/ https://www.barbneal.com/the-collection/tv-shows/the-three-s... Everyone's talking about the way to connect to the Mac, I'm just wondering if it's easier get the sound sources the Mac sounds the person wants were made from.

netsharc 2y ago
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.
- Terretta 2y ago
  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).
  - netsharc 2y ago
    Yes I said phrase. Audacity can zoom in...

fsckboy 2y ago

>The internal hard drive uses SCSI with an unusual connector. Adapting it didn't seem straightforward this was the way: SCSI is a bus mastering protocol which allows multiple masters to share the bus, which means you can plug two computers into the same SCSI bus at the same time and they will both be able to share access the disk device. You wouldn't want to rely on simultaneous access to the file system, but the entire disk from those days would be just a large file today and you could just dump the whole thing (the inconsistencies in the open file system would be like recovering from a crash, and none of the long term files would be affected) > and we weren't confident the old file system (HFS) would be easy to read from a modern system. the nice thing about opensource/New Jersey style is that that old HFS would be completely easy to mount loopback on linux I still have a complete disk image of my old Mac SE20 from 1988, and I still mount it up from time to time, and I pulled it off my old mac through the scsi bus. I believe the 20 referred to the MHz of the 68020 processor, but it also coincidentally had a 20MB disk, as was the case for the SE30 that came out the following year. > Deus fax machina: While the laptop has no networking software, it does have fax software ... The first question was how to turn the audio file into something faxable. this reminds me of an old idea I had that I never pursued. Back in the days of fax there was generally a cover sheet for tracking/delivery of faxes in an office environment, but which seemed like a waste of paper/modem time to me who was never in a big org situation. To cut to the chase for my idea, I thought it would be cool to transmit something like a large QR code on the coversheet, which would be an encoding of the document you were sending in .DOC (ms-word) format. That way, you could fax to a fax machine, but if the recipient was a computer modem it could receive the document in original format, and abort (via handshake) the rest of the fax transmission. I thought it would be a gentle way to transition past "obsolete" fax technology.

mbreese 2y ago

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?

p0seidon 2y ago
Had exactly the same thought.
gizajob 2y ago
I had this brainwave and basically duped your comment before I’d scrolled down to read it…
hypercube33 2y ago
A laptop of this age should have a serial port. It's possible even with something like Win95 to run a null modem and tcp/IP over that and SMB to copy files to a semi modern OS.
Evidlo 2y ago
He says he tried multiple font sizes.
tfvlrue 2y ago
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.
- Maxion 2y ago
  Did you try seeing how well ChatGPT was at OCRing the images? Though since it is HEX characters it might not do so good. I've found it to be very reliable at OCRin e.g. photos of receipts.

PreInternet01 2y ago

Well, the source site seems to be hosted on an 30-year-old laptop, and therefore unavailable (even trough archive.org), but here we go: -If you ever encounter a situation where "well, this volume might contain valuable data" is a thing, try to make a forensically-sound copy first; -Depending on the exact source media, this might be a very specific process. Don't skip on it, though. But, once you have an accurate copy of the source media, feel free to run any non-destructive experiments that you'd like. After, of course, publishing the source media for fellow enthousiasts...

tfvlrue 2y ago
> the source site seems to be hosted on an 30-year-old laptop You're not too far off :) It's actually hosted on super cheap shared VPS with only 768MB of RAM and a single CPU core. This is the first time it's seen any real heavy traffic, and all considered I think it did pretty well with such limited resources. I did a little postmortem investigation and, surprisingly, it wasn't CPU-bound. A low memory condition killed the database service a couple times. It looks like PHP-FPM was set to scale too aggressively. For the future I've reduced the number of workers it can spawn. Server administration is not my specialty, so this was a fun learning experience!
- lawrenceyan 2y ago
  Wow! That’s efficiency right there. I’m pretty sure you can get a device with those specs for <$10 today. Good job.
chedabob 2y ago
Someone managed to snag a copy: http://web.archive.org/web/20240531155301/https://www.unterminated.com/random-fun/how-to-copy-a-file-from-a-30-year-old-laptop http://web.archive.org/web/20240531155301/https://www.unterm...

axus 2y ago

Good story, I liked how they were almost thwarted by FCC fax regulations.

jeffhuys 2y ago
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…

duxup 2y ago

The phone line simulator was very impressive. I likely would have given up several times and just played the audio on the laptop and tried capturing it with another device (my phone) over the air.

tantalor 2y ago
I'd try cracking open the laptop and intercepting the audio signal before it goes to the built-in speaker

kleiba 2y ago

If you have OCR in the loop anyway, you could have just taken a picture of the file as displayed on the original laptop, no need to do the fax transfer.

kelnos 2y ago
Right. Fax is a terrible, crappy protocol that generates pretty bad images on the receiving side, even when you have clean phone lines. I wouldn't be surprised if a modern camera-phone photo of the screen displaying the text would yield a better image.
chem83 2y ago
Also, replace the ambiguous characters like D/0 or 3/8 to something a bit more recognizable like D becomes d and 8 becomes X and then do a find-replace after the OCR process. Was there really a need to write the OCR software from scratch?

sed3 2y ago

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.

ralphc 2y ago
According to everymac.com it has a serial port but macs had odd port shapes that need a special cable.

novagameco 2y ago

Did the laptop not have any kind of serial port to write to?

thrtythreeforty 2y ago

Is a fax implicitly an analog transmission? Or is there a digital data stream somewhere beneath the layer sending the photo that could be used like a modem?

Evidlo 2y ago
Digital bitmapped images over an analog channel.
utensil4778 2y ago
Very, very old faxes used to be purely analog. Since dial-up was invented, however, faxes are fully digital. If you've ever used a fax machine, you'll notice the classic dial-up handshake noises. Faxes are modems and vice-versa: any PC with a modem could send and receive faxes. It was a commonly advertised feature back in the day.

ruslan 2y ago

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_powerbook_duo280c.html#macspecs2 https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook_duo/specs/mac_p...

gcp123 2y ago
Yes, it had those ports. Just like Kevin McCallister could've called the police in Home Alone, I think the author preferred this to become an extraordinary story more than the simplest possible solve.
perakojotgenije 2y ago
That's the first thing that came to my mind. I remember connecting two laptops using LPT or COM cable and transferring files using norton commander (if I remember correctly) 30 years ago.
rvense 2y ago
Apple used 8-pin mini DIN connectors for serial. The author might not have had the right cable.
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
  A Farallon EtherWave provides Ethernet directly.
- ruslan 2y ago
  There are plenty of mini-DIN connectors and serial cables for mac on ebay. You need just three wires for serial line to work. I would strip the wires and plug them in without any connector. :)
- inferiorhuman 2y ago
  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.

anthk 2y ago

If you can fax I'm sure you can do some zmodem/ymodem.

gist 2y ago

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. Honestly that reason didn't make any sense to me at all. The other way might be interesting and fun but I don't think this is a reason not to attempt mounting the old file system. https://www.matthewhughes.co.uk/how-to-mount-hfs-classic-drives-on-macos-catalina-and-later/ https://www.matthewhughes.co.uk/how-to-mount-hfs-classic-dri...

anthk 2y ago
Linux will mount HFS drivers and files like nothing... This setup it's overcomplicated and hackey, but dumb in the end. You can mount old SCSI drivers with modern adaptors just fine, and Linux/BSD will either mount or extract HFS images with unar (I think) or hfsutils/hfstools. Or just spawn ymodem/zmodem compatible software (as he used a Fax setup for modem) and the problem would be solved in minutes.
- bombcar 2y ago
  Also it's a 30 year old Apple laptop - there are tons of resources available on how to do things with them. But, this worked with what he had at the time, so, eh, fun times.
elaus 2y ago
I sympathize with the notion to fix things in software instead of buying hardware (an SCSI adapter): You have to spend money, wait for it to arrive (or even leave the house to get it yourself!) and it's one more future plastic waste. If fiddling around and getting creative is something one enjoys (and has the time to do so), doing things like OP did is a nice alternative :)
- ssl-3 2y ago
  Used cables exist on platforms like eBay. (They can also be resold on eBay after they're done being used.)

chasil 2y ago

In my younger years, I had to pull a dBase 2 database off a CP/M desktop into an MS-DOS portable. I ended up configuring a serial cable, and running PROCOMM on the PC, set 9600/n/8/1 on both ports, then printed from dBase 2 and set PROCOMM to record the session to a file. It would lose characters if I let it run too long without a pause to write to a floppy, so I would ctrl-s/q on the CP/M side. I guess nobody else had ever figured out how to do this.

ruslan 2y ago
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.
- chasil 2y ago
  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 ports, which is the first choice in pulling data off of them (including binary data with XMODEM and its variants).
  - ruslan 2y ago
    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.
    - Symbiote 2y ago
      Looks like it's the MODE command: https://home.csulb.edu/~murdock/mode.html https://home.csulb.edu/~murdock/mode.html
- 2y ago

m_herrlich 2y ago

Jeez, no floppy drive on this laptop? How did people install stuff back then? But thanks, this is inspirational :)

zbentley 2y ago
It had one, but the author mentioned that the drive's hardware had failed.

mrunkel 2y ago

DB9 serial to USB Null modem cable + some simple file transfer software would have solved this in minutes. Since the mac had a built-in modem, you could have used that software to transfer the file via xmodem or ymodem protocol. I guess this isn't common knowledge any more.

meffie 2y ago
Should we tell them about fidonet too?
- ruslan 2y ago
  Knowing about Fidonet is too much. But a little bit of UUCP definitely won't hurt. ;)

qiqitori 2y ago

> 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 problem by writing a tool to help verify the OCR result. Basically you input the OCR'd result and segment the numbers. It'll display the original segmented characters ordered by their class, and the human eye will very quickly find any chars that do not belong, e.g. 3s sorted under "8" etc. https://blog.qiqitori.com/2023/03/ocring-hex-dumps-or-other-monospace-text-and-verifying-the-result/ https://blog.qiqitori.com/2023/03/ocring-hex-dumps-or-other-... https://blog.qiqitori.com/2023/03/ai-day-in-retroland-prolog-on-the-commodore-vic-20-needs-expanded-ram/ https://blog.qiqitori.com/2023/03/ai-day-in-retroland-prolog... I wrote two blog posts about this, and the tools are also linked from the blog posts. Note: the tools are just slightly more user-friendly than sendmail. That said, I don't know if these old Apple laptops came with anything resembling a programming environment (or at least that ancient version of Microsoft Word?), but even if not... There must be a better way (even without hardware hacking)!

OptionOfT 2y ago
This reminds me of an OCR application I used for converting PGS subs to SRT. It would show you words/letters grouped together and you had to approve / correct its translation.
jdthedisciple 2y ago
> 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 feel like this could be trivially solved by plugging an LLM to the OCR output with the sole task to correct spelling errors like that. That's pretty much one of the tasks LLMs should excell the most at.
- 2y ago

theideaofcoffee 2y ago

He 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.

JSR_FDED 2y ago
That was my first thought too!
mdorazio 2y ago
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.

josephcsible 2y ago

> Oops. The FCC says I need a cover page. Let's try to appease them. Yet another reason I hate when things I own try to enforce laws against me: there will be cases, like the author's, in which the law doesn't apply but the thing doesn't know it.

wannacboatmovie 2y ago

If it had "fax software" it almost certainly had terminal emulator software whereby one could use something like ZMODEM and not corrupting the files in the process. This was painful to read, like using a butter knife as a precision screwdriver.

WalterBright 2y ago

In the olden days, we transferred files using the RS232 serial port between computers that had no compatible media.

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btbuildem 2y ago

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 speakers, recorded on the recipient machine, and decoded it back to binary form there.

coolcoder613 2y ago
This "binary data" already is audio. The author did not want to do that because of the loss of fidelity.
- btbuildem 2y ago
  Seems like I didn't get the idea across clearly. While audio files are binary data, they're encoded in a specific way, and use specific playback codecs to render that binary into data suitable for playback by soundcard chipsets. Back, way back in the day (but not as far back as punch cards, but before diskettes), binary streams were persisted to tape. Not the backup tape used today, but regular audio cassettes. The data was converted into an audio stream, similar in nature to what you'd hear during a modem handshake. On the receiving end, the audio stream was decoded back into binary data, without any loss (well, given the robustness of error correction back then, sometimes you'd have to try again). The key point being, the audio was just a transport layer for binary data, which could have been anything -- images, code, text, audio files, etc.
- kortex 2y ago
  Sounds like GP is suggesting digitally encoding/modulating the audio bitstream, like using the speaker as a modem. Which would be far less lossy than trying to record the analog signal.
- anthk 2y ago
  Minimodem using 1200 BPS with Opus@64KBPS it's pretty usable, the file doesn't get very huge.

t0mek 2y ago

A 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. [1] https://blog.rekawek.eu/2016/12/08/mac-plus#hard-drive https://blog.rekawek.eu/2016/12/08/mac-plus#hard-drive [2] https://bluescsi.com/ https://bluescsi.com/

Agingcoder 2y ago
I dreamt of Zip drives back in the days - I never quite understood white they didn’t become standard, much like usb drives would become later.
- fluentbyfire 2y ago
  Zip drives malfunctioned too much. The "click of death" they used to call it.
- WoodenChair 2y ago
  They sorta did in the Apple world. Maybe not quite a standard, but quite common. Apple shipped several Macs with (optionally) built-in Zip drives in the late 1990s.
- kalleboo 2y ago
  They were proprietary and made by only one company. So there was a bit of a battle between Zip, SyQuest and LS120 ("SuperDisk") What I don't get is why Magneto-Optical didn't take off. 3.5" disks that were essentially MiniDisc but not proprietary (there were drives and disks from several manufacturers), faster than Zip, and eventually got upgraded to over 1 GB capacity disks. They were huge in Japan where they became a de-facto standard, but mostly unheard of in the rest of the world.

endgame 2y ago

The fax is a good trick, but my favourite story of this type involves a hand-written hex editor and many, many, hours of copying bytes by hand: http://www.oocities.org/zztexpert/docs/upoprgv4.html http://www.oocities.org/zztexpert/docs/upoprgv4.html

semi 2y ago
interesting story but i really wonder why he wrote it out with pencil and paper rather than directly typing it into the other computer.

Brajeshwar 2y ago

Wow! That was an exciting read. It was way too complex for my limited knowledge of computers. 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.

cornholio 2y ago
Sounds like an IBM Portable PC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Portable_Personal_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Portable_Personal_Computer Although the screen on that would have been somewhat larger than a 3.5" floppy (and it didn't even come with 3.5 floppies, just 5.25). You could find a smaller screen on the Osborne 1 and other early 80s portables, but they wouldn't have run DOS. PC Convertible is another option: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_Convertible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_Convertible

kk6mrp 2y ago

Did you get Doom on it the same way?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jorgelbg 2y ago

Immediately took me back to the scene from Firewall (2006) when Harrison Ford is copying the account data with an iPod and a fax machine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J13jKfVH01o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J13jKfVH01o ^_^.

charbuff 2y ago
What an epic save. I have a few laptops and harddrives that I have been wanting to convert for years, and this motivates me again to try since I know that they're a bunch of ide and nvme connectors, nothing near the hoops the author had to jump through.

cabirum 2y ago

Does it have a working C compiler? May have tried hacking together a data-over-audio app. Or quickly steam a bunch of qr codes.

rusk 2y ago
Probably not

dewfaced 2y ago

Was Appletalk not installed? It just used a apple printer cable to do networking, this is how I played Warcraft II back in the day.

gumby 2y ago

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.

goda90 2y ago

I 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.

jandrese 2y ago

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.

Suppafly 2y ago
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.
- jandrese 2y ago
  Ah, that makes sense. The problem with the Appletalk to Ethernet adapter is that would definitely need drivers that are unlikely to exist on the Mac. Given that, then using the serial port with a dumb terminal would be the next best option, but IIRC MacOS didn't ship with a terminal application so there's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. What might exist is an Appletalk implementation for the GPIO ports on a Raspberry Pi or similar board, which would let you use the built-in Appletalk file sharing to get stuff on and off of the machine. The retrocomputing scene has to have something like that, it would be extremely useful.

1970-01-01 2y ago

You can also print it: http://ollydbg.de/Paperbak/#1 http://ollydbg.de/Paperbak/#1

Suppafly 2y ago

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.

ska 2y ago
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.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  I suppose it depends on how fast you needed a solution too, getting an adapter for the hard drive probably would have been the easiest method even if you had to wait a week for one to come from ebay. Likewise, a replacement floppy drive could have been purchased too. Overall OP came up with a workable solution that didn't really require much in the way of purchases, and it might help someone else out in the future, it's just so strange.

eviks 2y ago

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?

ska 2y ago

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...

mongol 2y ago

Didn't it have 3.5" floppy disk?

giantrobot 2y ago
The Duos did not have internal floppy drives. They had external floppies that used the docking port. Or you'd use a floppy in a big Duo Dock. This was not uncommon in the mid-90s for a smaller laptop.

mysteria 2y ago

Since these are audio recordings an easier hardware approach would be to tap the output of the motherboard's D/A converter right before the speaker amp and capture it with an A/D. You could also tap the speaker wires which should be easier than tapping thin SMD traces, though the signal might have been highpassed before amplication to better support the small laptop speakers. Of course this means you'll have to disassemble the ancient laptop and all that, and it won't be a bitperfect capture. For voice recordings though the quality should be more than adequate.