reading legacy floppy disks

[Christopher Browne]

On 9/4/06, Dave Mason <dmason-bqArmZWzea/GcjXNFnLQ/w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> I have a bunch of 7" (yes, 7-inch) double-sided, high density (something
> over 1MB per disk) floppies that I want to try to read.  I really just
> want a dump onto a CD.  I can decode the format (UCSD P-System) and extract the
> data.  These were probably last used 20 years ago, but have been stored
> fairly carefully.  I don't have much of a budget for this, but I would
> really like to read them, if possible.
>
> Any ideas, offers, or recommendations much appreciated!

Are you sure that's 7"?

The sequence of "floppy" formats was 8", then 5 1/4", then 3.5.

I do not recall there ever being 7" floppies.

Ebay.ca lists one relevant drive; a Shugart 851, located in England,
priced at about $850...

It's going to be challenging to find a suitable reader.  If someone
has an old CP/M machine, that may be helpful.  Unfortunately, this
represents hardware that is *really* obsolete, which has been replaced
by a bunch of successive hardware generations...
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