Reading Mac Floppies . . .

[Richmond Mathewson]

I have a large number of floppies loaded with HC stacks and all sorts of other stuff and have recently transferred the lot onto a couple of CDs; this is how I did it:

1. went into my attic and dug out an old Performa 5200.

2. dug out my old SCSI 2x CD burner. Toast 3 aloowed me to burn a WIN-compatible CD.

end of story.

Another possible recipe:

1. Find a pre-Blue G3 Mac with a LAN port and connect it to another computer (Mac, PC with WIN, PC with LINUX) with a twisted pair cable or via an ethernet Hub/Switch.

recently a friend of mine wanted some old Word-for-Mac files moved from Mac formatted floppies onto their WIN XP box - so I hooked up my (bloody heavy) 5200 to the XP box via an ethernet hub, fiddled around with sharing in Mac OS 8.1, and transferred the contents of the floppies onto the 5200; then opened the 5200 hard-disc from the XP box.

By the way . . . this is not nearly as fiddly and threatening as it sounds:

all the documentation about how to do this with Mac OS systems 7.1 - 9 is available on the Apple website.

There are lots and lots of old Macs lurking in attics and cellars all across North America and Western Europe just waiting for the moment when we all wake up and realise that they can be extremely useful now that Apple have definitely abandoned floppy drives (silly bunch!).

sincerely, Richmond Mathewson


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"Philosophical problems are confusions arising owing to the fluidity of meanings users attach to words and phrases."
                                       Mathewson, 2006
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