Need to extract files from a 1994 computer? Send a fax!
Sending files by fax

Moving files between modern computers is easy. USB drives, memory cards, email, direct transfer, the cloud... there are many options. But imagine you need to pull data from a PowerBook Duo 280c from 1994. It has no USB ports, its internal drive uses a strange connector, there's no floppy, it can't connect to the internet, and you can't install other programs to simplify the process. Luke from the Unterminated portal found himself in this curious situation, and his solution was... to send it by fax.

Everyone knows I sometimes get caught up in nostalgia, but there are things in computing that even I don't want to go back to. The floppy disk is one of them: its last generations were so bad that they allowed only two or three uses before starting to spit out bad sectors. Still, the floppy still has a place, guaranteeing a minimal compatibility platform between old systems. Now, what happens when we can't even use floppies to extract files from an old computer?

Luke from the Unterminated portal faced this challenge with an Apple PowerBook Duo 280c from 1994 that he received from a relative. The computer holds some audio files, but its external floppy doesn't work, the internal hard drive is SCSI with a proprietary connector, and there are no audio outputs. Official specs report the presence of a serial port, and there's always the possibility of using something like Zmodem, however... there's also a phone jack, and that opens another path: Fax.

Sending files by fax with a 1994 computer

Need to extract files from a 1994 computer? Send a fax!
First step, get the content in hexadecimal format

Thanks to the presence of a program called ResEdit on the computer, Luke managed to read the files as pure hexadecimal, and paste their content into a Microsoft Word document. GlobalFax does the heavy lifting of sending it by fax... but to what number? In reality, Luke used a ThinkPad T60 with Windows XP as the destination. The problem is that it's not enough to connect both computers with a phone cable. The process requires a line voltage simulator circuit so that both modems see the correct voltages.

Need to extract files from a 1994 computer? Send a fax!
Pasting the hex in Word...
Need to extract files from a 1994 computer? Send a fax!
Modifying the phone cable to get the correct voltages, ft. Wago connectors

Six pages in seven minutes at 14,400 bps completed the transfer, but one goal remains: that the OCR algorithm doesn't make conversion errors. The first result was quite good, but the natural failures of OCR caused many pops and clicks in the audio file. None of the programs Luke used can guarantee 100 percent accuracy: the use of hexadecimal limits the set to 16 characters (0-9 and A-F), however, it's quite common to confuse 0 with D, or 9 with 4. Luke's solution? Create a new OCR program that consults the user when it detects a new pattern, and remembers the answer.

Need to extract files from a 1994 computer? Send a fax!
If for some reason you need to convert hexadecimal documents... now you have the software to do it

The final result is an exact byte-for-byte copy of the original file... and the most complicated file transfer in history.

Official site: Click here