reading legacy floppy disks

[James Knott]

Christopher Browne wrote:
> 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...

Of course, after 20 years the data might not be readable.


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