Looking for computer and individual to read old floppy disks

[Fred Cisin]

>>>> 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