11 Mar
2022
11 Mar
'22
9:28 a.m.
Dear Classic Computers Members,I am looking for someone who had an operating floppy disk
drive that can read old 5-1/4" floppy disks from the 1980s.I may also need someone to
read hard, 3" floppies.?The disks can be mailed and the info can be saved as text and
sent via email or to the Cloud.I would need a price estimate, as well. I live in
Virginia.Thank you in advance.Terry Joseph
11 Mar
11 Mar
10 a.m.
I use a greaseweazle to read and format DEC RX01/RX02 8" diskettes. It
supports all sizes and formats.
https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle
https://decromancer.ooo/greaseweazle/
https://retrocmp.de/hardware/greaseweazle/greaseweazle.htm
https://www.tindie.com/search/?q=greastweazle
On 3/11/2022 11:28 AM, Terry Cox-Joseph via cctalk wrote:
Dear Classic Computers Members,I am looking for
someone who had an operating floppy disk drive that can read old 5-1/4" floppy disks
from the 1980s.I may also need someone to read hard, 3" floppies.?The disks can be
mailed and the info can be saved as text and sent via email or to the Cloud.I would need a
price estimate, as well. I live in Virginia.Thank you in advance.Terry Joseph
10:07 a.m.
Terry,
If you're willing to travel to Kennett Square, PA we have a diskette
archiving station set up for use here. Contact me privately if interested.
Bill Degnan
CONTACT---> https://www.kennettclassic.com/contact.cfm
On Fri, Mar 11, 2022 at 12:41 PM Terry Cox-Joseph via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Dear Classic Computers Members,I am looking for
someone who had an
operating floppy disk drive that can read old 5-1/4" floppy disks from the
1980s.I may also need someone to read hard, 3" floppies. The disks can be
mailed and the info can be saved as text and sent via email or to the
Cloud.I would need a price estimate, as well. I live in Virginia.Thank you
in advance.Terry Joseph
1:14 p.m.
On Fri, 11 Mar 2022, Terry Cox-Joseph via cctalk wrote:
Dear Classic Computers Members,I am looking for
someone who had an
operating floppy disk drive that can read old 5-1/4" floppy disks from
the 1980s.I may also need someone to read hard, 3" floppies.?The disks
can be mailed and the info can be saved as text and sent via email or to
the Cloud.I would need a price estimate, as well. I live in
Virginia.
Thank you in advance.
Terry Joseph
You might want to include a little more information.
1) Are you trying to make machine readable images that are only for
storage and later duplication?
OR, do you want to be able to get use of the content of the FILES on them?
Your mention of "sent as text" implies that they are word processing
files, but 1980s word processors stored their text in files that are
incomprehensible to "modern" word processors. Current Microsoft Office
can no longer handle Wordstar, Electric Pencil, Scripsit, or WordPervert
files (or many hundreds of others).
2) Which of the [thousands] of disk formats are they?
You should clarify those two questions before you send the disks to
somebody who can't help you do what YOU want.
In the 1980s, there were several different formats of floppy disks.
Some estimates are as high as 2500 mutually incompatible formats of floppy
disks, most of which were 5.25".
IF those are floppy disks from a PC, then there are two common formats
("360k" and "1.2M"), out of six formats used by IBM, and a PC with a
"1.2M" drive can easily read five of those. With some special extra
software, it can also read the sixth one (IBM PCJX).
Hundreds of the non-PC 5.25" formats can be read on a PC with special
extra software.
There are some, such as Apple, NorthStar, Vector Graphic, Victor, Sirius,
that require special extra hardware AND software to read on a PC.
3" floppies were used by the Amstrad, in double sided, single sided, or
"flippy" formats. The second side of the "flippy" disks can be read
by
flipping it over in a single sided 3" drive, but will require special
hardware or software to get at if you only have the double sided 3" drive.
3" floppies were also used by Amdek, the most popular being [mutually
incompatible] Apple and Coco.
But, you are PROBABLY thinking about 3.5" floppies, rather than 3".
In which case, the PC used "720K" and "1.4M" (usually erroneously
called
"1.44M", which was NOT the correct capacity for any rational meaning of
MegaByte)
Apple used "400K"/"800K" (single and double sided), and
"1.4M".
Reading the Apple "1.4M" can be easily done on a PC with special extra
software.
Reading the Apple "400K"/"800K" on a PC requires special extra
hardware
AND special extra software.
Other than those most common ones, there are at least a hundred other
3.5" formats that will require special extra software, and a rare few,
such as the Tandy portable drive for model 100/200, etc. that require
special extra hardware.
Sorry, right now, I do not have convenient access to any of the hardware.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
1:38 p.m.
I could do it, but I'm a little squeezed for time and energy right now.
Spending my mornings under the LINAC.
--Chuck
5:39 p.m.
On Fri, 11 Mar 2022, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
I could do it, but I'm a little squeezed for time
and energy right now.
Spending my mornings under the LINAC.
Yikes!
The word "under" means that you are not doing atomic physics experiments.
Very sorry to hear it.
I got more details from the guy with the disks. They are apparently
"360K" PC floppies with XYWRITE files, and he wants to load the file
contents into a "modern"? word processor. So hopefully, somebody can help
him, with a simple COPY *.*, and I think that he now understands that he
might also need to get back a copy of XYWRITE to turn the file content
into something usable.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
6:04 p.m.
On 3/11/22 20:39, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
On Fri, 11 Mar 2022, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
It was mentioned that he would pay someone to do this. Why not just
tell him to buy a $20 USB Floppy from Amazon and copy them himself?
bill
I could do it, but I'm a little squeezed for
time and energy right now.
Spending my mornings under the LINAC.
Yikes!
The word "under" means that you are not doing atomic physics experiments.
Very sorry to hear it.
I got more details from the guy with the disks.? They are apparently
"360K" PC floppies with XYWRITE files, and he wants to load the file
contents into a "modern"? word processor.? So hopefully, somebody can
help him, with a simple COPY *.*, and I think that he now understands
that he might also need to get back a copy of XYWRITE to turn the file
content into something usable.
6:25 p.m.
> I got more details from the guy with the disks.?
They are apparently
> "360K" PC floppies with XYWRITE files, and he wants to load the file
> contents into a "modern"? word processor.? So hopefully, somebody can help
> him, with a simple COPY *.*, and I think that he now understands that he
> might also need to get back a copy of XYWRITE to turn the file content into
> something usable.
On Fri, 11 Mar 2022, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
It was mentioned that he would pay someone to do this.
Why not just
tell him to buy a $20 USB Floppy from Amazon and copy them himself?
5.25" USB floppies seem to be scarce now!
I didn't do any serious searching, but neither Amazon nor eBay showed any
obvious (on first page) hits.
Some of the early USB drives, even if 3.5", MIGHT separate controller and
drive enough to be modifiable, . . .
I would GUESS that the "modern" ones are too "integrated".
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
6:32 p.m.
On Fri, Mar 11, 2022 at 7:25 PM Fred Cisin via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:
There are no 5.25" USB floppies. Well, not 100% true (there are values in
the
identifier strings that tell you it's a 1.2MB floppy vs a 1.44MB floppy),
but as
a practical matter, you can't find them. I've looked and gave up... That's
how
I wound up with my kyroflux + TEAC drive (though a greaseweasel is a
better choice these days)...
If these are the old 360k diskettes, then you'd be out of luck the USB
route..
But an imager would be on the order of $30 for the greaseweasel, or
similar, and
another $40 for a working 5.25" drive and a few hours of your time to set
it up and
figure it all out... So anybody copying the disks for < ~$100 or $150 would
be cost
effective for this person...
The harder part is converting XYWRITE files into something more mordern...
Warner
> I got more
details from the guy with the disks. They are apparently
> "360K" PC floppies with XYWRITE files, and he wants to load the file
> contents into a "modern"? word processor. So hopefully, somebody can
help
> him, with a simple COPY *.*, and I think that
he now understands that
he
> might also need to get back a copy of XYWRITE
to turn the file content
into
> something usable.
On Fri, 11 Mar 2022, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
It was mentioned that he would pay someone to do
this. Why not just
tell him to buy a $20 USB Floppy from Amazon and copy them himself?
5.25" USB floppies seem to be scarce now!
I didn't do any serious searching, but neither Amazon nor eBay showed any
obvious (on first page) hits.
Some of the early USB drives, even if 3.5", MIGHT separate controller and
drive enough to be modifiable, . . .
I would GUESS that the "modern" ones are too "integrated".
7:03 p.m.
On 3/11/22 18:32, Warner Losh via cctalk wrote:
There are no 5.25" USB floppies. Well, not 100%
true (there are
values in the identifier strings that tell you it's a 1.2MB floppy vs
a 1.44MB floppy), but as a practical matter, you can't find them.
I've looked and gave up... That's how I wound up with my kyroflux +
TEAC drive (though a greaseweasel is a better choice these days)...
Not completely true--in the old USB 1.0 days, there were a very few
USB-to-floppy bridges that could talk 5.25' 250Kbit/sec-speak. SMC had
one such and I suspect that multi-chip implementations were also available.
But given that few new people understand anything that's not Windows, it
would be a futile effort, I suspect.
All the best,
Chuck
7:25 p.m.
On Fri, Mar 11, 2022, 8:04 PM Chuck Guzis via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:
On 3/11/22 18:32, Warner Losh via cctalk wrote:
Yea, that's why I said almost. The standard interface just allows an LBA
and only certain fixed formats are defined that are very high level. This
isn't conducive to different formats, data rates, etc. Unless there are
nonstandard endpoints, all you can read is the 1.2MB diskettes... I spent a
lot of time making this work with the 1.44mb 3.5" drive on FreeBSD. It
can't even read 720k diskettes, at least the drive I had...
But given that few new people understand anything that's not Windows, it
There are no 5.25" USB floppies. Well, not
100% true (there are
values in the identifier strings that tell you it's a 1.2MB floppy vs
a 1.44MB floppy), but as a practical matter, you can't find them.
I've looked and gave up... That's how I wound up with my kyroflux +
TEAC drive (though a greaseweasel is a better choice these days)...
Not completely true--in the old USB 1.0 days, there were a very few
USB-to-floppy bridges that could talk 5.25' 250Kbit/sec-speak. SMC had
one such and I suspect that multi-chip implementations were also available
would be a futile effort, I suspect.
True. It's likely easier to use an imager and TEAC if they are 360k
diskettes... or pay someone :)
Warner
All the best,
Chuck
7:34 p.m.
>>> I got more details from the guy with the
disks. They are apparently
>>> "360K" PC floppies with XYWRITE files, and he wants to load the
file
>>> contents into a "modern"? word processor. So hopefully, somebody
can
>>> help him, with a simple COPY *.*, and I think that he now understands
>>> that he might also need to get back a copy of XYWRITE to turn the
>>> file content into something usable.
>> It was mentioned that he would pay someone to
do this. Why not just
>> tell him to buy a $20 USB Floppy from Amazon and copy them himself?
On Fri, Mar 11, 2022 at 7:25 PM Fred Cisin via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:
> 5.25" USB floppies seem to be scarce now!
> I didn't do any serious searching, but neither Amazon nor eBay showed any
> obvious (on first page) hits.
> Some of the early USB drives, even if 3.5", MIGHT separate controller and
> drive enough to be modifiable, . . .
> I would GUESS that the "modern" ones are too "integrated".
On Fri, 11 Mar 2022, Warner Losh wrote:
There are no 5.25" USB floppies. Well, not 100%
true (there are values
in the identifier strings that tell you it's a 1.2MB floppy vs a 1.44MB
floppy), but as a practical matter, you can't find them. I've looked and
gave up... That's how I wound up with my kyroflux + TEAC drive (though a
greaseweasel is a better choice these days)...
If these are the old 360k diskettes, then you'd be out of luck the USB
route.. But an imager would be on the order of $30 for the greaseweasel,
or similar, and another $40 for a working 5.25" drive and a few hours of
your time to set it up and figure it all out... So anybody copying the
disks for < ~$100 or $150 would be cost effective for this person...
If somebody DID make a 1.2M USB floppy, it would seem likely that they
OUGHT TO include the 360K option within it, . . .
But, if 1.2M USB drives exist, or ever existed, they're R at RE
I HOPE that the USB 1.4M drives handle 720K, . . .
The harder part is converting XYWRITE files into
something more mordern...
In his further detail private message, He seemd to understand that he
might have to get a replacement copy of XYWRITE (he said that he gave his
to Goodwill a few months ago), and do a load and SAVE-AS for each file.
Yes, it was always fun trying to explain to people that COPYing the
Wordstar file was NOT the cause of the "corruption of the last letter of
each word". Fortunately, THAT one was trivial to deal with. I don't know
anything about the file structure of XYWRITE.
[This reply was delayed by a power failure]
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
7:37 p.m.
On Fri, Mar 11, 2022, 8:34 PM Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
It ought to... but that's not defined in the standard...
But, if 1.2M USB drives exist, or ever existed, they're R at RE
>>> I
got more details from the guy with the disks. They are apparently
>>> "360K" PC floppies with XYWRITE files, and he wants to load the
file
>>> contents into a "modern"? word processor. So hopefully, somebody
can
>>> help him, with a simple COPY *.*, and I think that he now understands
>>> that he might also need to get back a copy of XYWRITE to turn the
>>> file content into something usable.
>> It was mentioned that he would pay
someone to do this. Why not just
>> tell him to buy a $20 USB Floppy from Amazon and copy them himself?
On Fri, Mar 11, 2022 at 7:25 PM Fred Cisin via
cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:
> 5.25" USB floppies seem to be scarce now!
> I didn't do any serious searching, but neither Amazon nor eBay showed
any
> obvious (on first page) hits.
> Some of the early USB drives, even if 3.5", MIGHT separate controller
and
> drive enough to be modifiable, . . .
> I would GUESS that the "modern" ones are too "integrated".
On Fri, 11 Mar 2022, Warner Losh wrote:
There are no 5.25" USB floppies. Well, not
100% true (there are values
in the identifier strings that tell you it's a 1.2MB floppy vs a 1.44MB
floppy), but as a practical matter, you can't find them. I've looked and
gave up... That's how I wound up with my kyroflux + TEAC drive (though a
greaseweasel is a better choice these days)...
If these are the old 360k diskettes, then you'd be out of luck the USB
route.. But an imager would be on the order of $30 for the greaseweasel,
or similar, and another $40 for a working 5.25" drive and a few hours of
your time to set it up and figure it all out... So anybody copying the
disks for < ~$100 or $150 would be cost effective for this person...
If somebody DID make a 1.2M USB floppy, it would seem likely that they
OUGHT TO include the 360K option within it, . . .
I HOPE that the USB 1.4M drives handle 720K, . . .
That's what I hoped when I bought it, but no joy. Even trying nonstandard
format values was no help. It would only read 1.44MB.
Warner
The harder part is converting XYWRITE files into
something more mordern...
In his further detail private message, He seemd to understand that he
might have to get a replacement copy of XYWRITE (he said that he gave his
to Goodwill a few months ago), and do a load and SAVE-AS for each file.
Yes, it was always fun trying to explain to people that COPYing the
Wordstar file was NOT the cause of the "corruption of the last letter of
each word". Fortunately, THAT one was trivial to deal with. I don't know
anything about the file structure of XYWRITE.
[This reply was delayed by a power failure]
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
7:57 p.m.
There are no 5.25" USB floppies. Well, not 100%
true (there are values
in the identifier strings that tell you it's a 1.2MB floppy vs a 1.44MB
floppy), but as a practical matter, you can't find them. I've looked and
gave up... That's how I wound up with my kyroflux + TEAC drive (though a
greaseweasel is a better choice these days)...
If these are the old 360k diskettes, then you'd be out of luck the USB
route.. But an imager would be on the order of $30 for the greaseweasel,
or similar, and another $40 for a working 5.25" drive and a few hours of
your time to set it up and figure it all out... So anybody copying the
disks for < ~$100 or $150 would be cost effective for this person...
If somebody DID make a 1.2M USB floppy, it would seem likely that they
OUGHT TO include the 360K option within it, . . . It ought to... but that's not defined in the
standard...
But, if 1.2M USB drives exist, or ever existed, they're R at RE
Well, it requires two different data transfer rates, two write durrents if
you want to WRITE, enough smarts to recognize what it sees, and software
that supports both sets of format parameters.
Nevertheless, designing a 1.4M without 720K support or a 1.2M without
360K support would seem to be unclear on the concept.
And, a properly designed 1.4M should be even able to handle BOTH PC 1.4M
and Mac 1.4M.
I'll cut them some slack on not supporting 160K, 180K, 320K, or being able
to provide lower level access (INT13H equivalent) for non-PC formats.
(Although that is obviously what I would want)
There was a time about 30 years ago, . . .
a couple different companies took tiny single boards, such as Ampro Little
Board, stuck them in a box with a floppy drive, and custom software that
included communication through serial port, and marketed them as things
such as "MACINTOSH drive for PC, AND OTHER, disks"!
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
I HOPE that the USB 1.4M drives handle 720K, . .
.
That's what I hoped when I bought it, but no joy. Even trying nonstandard
format values was no help. It would only read 1.44MB.
8:12 p.m.
On 3/11/22 19:57, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
There was a time about 30 years ago, . . .
a couple different companies took tiny single boards, such as Ampro
Little Board, stuck them in a box with a floppy drive, and custom
software that included communication through serial port, and marketed
them as things such as "MACINTOSH drive for PC, AND OTHER, disks"!
I've got a little FAX-to-printer box (passthrough from PC) has a 3.5"
floppy integrated and a NEC V40 CPU running the thing. On a lark, I
ported CP/M-86 to the thing for yucks (has a serial port for debugging).
Let's also not forget the Micro Solutions Backpack drive, which
interfaced to a PC printer port and came in both 3.5" and 5.25" flavors.
Had a 16KB DRAM buffer, an 8051 MCU and a DP8473 FDC with about 256
bytes of NVRAM for configuration. Using the printer port, you could
send controls to the FDC and send and receive data from the buffer RAM.
It could even handle 8" single-density floppies, if you had the right
cable. We sold a couple hundred of those things modified for Japanese
CNC use.
--Chuck
7:05 p.m.
On 3/11/22 18:04, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
It was mentioned that he would pay someone to do
this.? Why not just
tell him to buy a $20 USB Floppy from Amazon and copy them himself?
If he wants, he can send them to me. After all, it's just a few
keystrokes for me. However, I don't do this for free.
--Chuck
12 Mar
12 Mar
10:28 a.m.
On Fri, 11 Mar 2022 at 22:38, Chuck Guzis via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
I could do it, but I'm a little squeezed for time and energy right now.
Spending my mornings under the LINAC.
Oh no. :-( Very sorry to hear that. I hope it's worth it and it works!
(So far they've got 'em all early, but had another nasty little polyp
carved out of my colon on Tuesday morning. There were 5 last year. One
of these years they're going to miss one, and my ticket will come up.)
--
Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven
UK: (+44) 7939-087884 ~ Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053
797
days inactive
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16 comments
8 participants
participants (8)
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bill.gunshannon＠hotmail.com -
billdegnan＠gmail.com -
bitwiz＠12bitsbest.com -
cclist＠sydex.com -
cisin＠xenosoft.com -
imp＠bsdimp.com -
lproven＠gmail.com -
tcoxjoseph＠aol.com