It's highly unlikely any terminal software would be installed on an old Mac, even if it had a modem. (Although I don't know about Clarisworks.) It was counter to the whole mentality. There was a bootstrapping problem where you needed to get the software which allowed you to download the software, and even the common MacBinary/Stuffit/etc programs did not come with the system.
Because serial ports (and modems) were pretty much the default thing to use (besides LocalTalk and AppleTalk) the desktop software usually supported that out of the box, no terminal required. This is also why Fax support was built in, because even then, any other type of peer connectivity wasn't really big enough. And around that same time, ClarisWorks was also really common on Macs.
Now, we don't know for sure that the author also had ClarisWorks, but we don't really know much about what was available in general (except the games, the sound files and the fax). But in general serial file transfers, modem and serial based methods were pretty 'normal' to have.
Good finds everyone! Other than LocalTalk (which was 'normal'), I don't believe the old MacOS had any OOB support for serial transfers. Thus Clarisworks or ZTerm or etc was needed.
From the screenshot after the picture of the battery and a picture of a circuit diagram, we can see that the fax software is from Global Village ("GlobalFax PowerPort/Mercury Duo", probably v2.5)
GlobalFax had a terminal emulator app included, most likely ZTerm, in this case.
" the absolute garbage terminal emulator software we were including in the box.
And I set about pestering Rick to get somebody to Dave Alverson’s ZTerm terminal emulator app bundled with our modems because it was light and easy and supported the ZModem file transfer protocol which "
So the user could have likely run ZTerm to transfer the files.
Should we discover any more files to recover from the laptop, I may explore this avenue a bit further. If the ZTerm software is present, the trickiest part might be physically connecting the serial port to something else. Not an insurmountable problem.
As a poor Atari owner out in the nowere, I used metal paper-clips bent into shape and welded cables on them to connect my weird non-standard ports to other things. Worked pretty good :-)
SLIP, zmodem, and uuencode are tremendously useful when no other options are available.
I suspect you won't even have uudecode, in which case so long as you can transfer binary files, self-extracting ZIP files should work. Might take a while for larger transfers.
Getting a Real Operating System onto the old laptop would be a benefit. You might want to look into boot-from-floppy options including TomsRootBoot and Trinux. The former fits onto a single 1.5 MB floppy ("superformatted" to about 1.7 or 1.8 MB). The latter uses 2--3 disk images to include a number of more formidable tools.
Trinux still has a Sourceforge page, though I've not dug into it. You may need to hit up Internet Archive for working images:
I don't think that will work on non-x86 architectures. As far as I know, you can't boot linux on 68LC040 at all, perhaps if someone forked uCLinux and made it work with no FPU and no MMU you might get something going, because all the 68k linux variants expect a MMU that works, which on that specific CPU is too buggy. You can't run MkLinux kernels either since those are PPC OldWorld, which came after 68k.
There might be Powerbook Linux boot floppy, though NetBSD might be a better choice. The CPU appears to be a 68LC040: <https://support.apple.com/en-us/112137>
Looking at the reporting, it does seem like the 68LC040 emulation at least worked (just slightly buggy), which is much better than the not-booting Linux of the same era. I should probably not be surprised to see NetBSD run on yet another thing ;-)
I wonder what has been ported to more hardware at this point: NetBSD or bare metal Doom.
Some years back I seem to recall Debian making the claim to support more hardware (if not necessarily the same hardware) as NetBSD. I cannot verify this presently however....
ClarisWorks had a "communications" module which is effectively a serial terminal, and which supported sending and receiving files. I'm not sure if it internally supported MacBinary, but it'd at least be enough to get files off the system.
The ClarisWorks communication module could act as a TTY, like HyperTerminal. You could just dump text into it and copy from the buffer to SimpleText if you really wanted.
It did automatically detect MacBinary, I think there's even some example out there of someone doing exactly this. You don't need a terminal on the old Mac, but they did use a new Mac because it came with the macbinary tool preinstalled which makes it all very easy.
