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

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-...

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)!

Arn't there a serial (COM) port available on that laptop ? It was kind of ubiquitous at those days. This website [1] says there were two of them. Solving the probem with Zmodem would be trivial. The software (terminal) is already there, it seems.

1. https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook_duo/specs/mac_p...

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?

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.

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-dri...

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.

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?

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.

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

[2] https://bluescsi.com/

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...

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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-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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Didn't it have 3.5" floppy disk?

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

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 ^_^.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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!

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...

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Video hex display and camera recording...

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.

raspberry pi with serial and localtalk. done.

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

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.

people have done floppy<->SD card emulators for over a decade such as here (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.

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...

Did you get Doom on it the same way?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

Uh... Laplink serial cable?

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.

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.

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= 

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

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.

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?

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.

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).

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.

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...

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

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.

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?

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 !

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...

If you can find it, there's an adapter for the drive

https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/adtx-scsi-ide-2-5-in...

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