How do you transfer files off an Apple laptop from 1994? It’s harder than it sounds! Luke had a family member present with an interesting problem: a PowerBook Duo 280c laptop from 1994 containing a few short audio recordings he wanted to preserve. A quick analysis of the problem at hand revealed a couple things working in our favor:
The laptop still boots… after a few gentle taps on the hard drive to get it to spin up!
The audio files playback locally through the laptop’s internal speakers.
On the other hand:
The laptop has no audio jacks, so we couldn’t get good analog copies of the recordings even if we wanted to.
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.
An external floppy drive accompanied the laptop… but the computer would not run with it connected. We couldn’t figure out the hardware fault causing this.
The laptop has an AppleTalk port and a phone jack… but no networking software installed.
The laptop does have a phone dialer application, which gave the first clue towards a potential solution. Fax a representation of the file to a fax receiver. (Not straightforward!)
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