Looking for computer and individual to read old floppy disks

[Warner Losh]

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:
>
> > 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
>

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
> 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
>