[ih] Floppy/Stiffy Disks

[Al Whaley]

I trip over these 3.5" discs pretty often and generally find them 
readable.  If the disc has been sitting in someone's car, then that 
would be different. It is possible to find USB readers pretty easily.  
It's a bit harder to find a MAC USB unit, and I find useful to have 
both, though not essential.  Early MACs used 400KB and 800KB formats 
with variable speed rotation and GCR encoding, and yes, those were 3.5 
inch discs - the same physical discs used for PCs (DD, not HD), but 
definitely not the PC recording format.  Reading those today would 
require special or rather hard-to-find equipment, but Apple switched to 
PC format in 1988 IIRC so a disc from the 90s shouldn't be a problem, 
unless the MAC in question was older.  You didn't mention what computer 
wrote the discs...  I do my disc reading of 1.44MB discs on a Linux 
box.  The tools there are superb, and I can copy the data off raw and 
then do a virtual mount of the 'disc' file in whatever format I need 
to.  A friend's old MAC discs from the mid 90s couldn't be read anymore 
by a MAC as the file system was no longer supported, but the Linux box 
had tools that I could use after I got the raw data copied off.

It's better with old discs, floppy or hard drives, if the unit might be 
marginal, to copy the data off sequentially on  Linux box so there's not 
a lot of seeking (dd command).  The chance of getting the data that way 
is much higher.  (For hard discs though there are special Linux tools, 
better than dd.)

Good luck.

On 12/12/2025 22:59, Eberhard W Lisse via Internet-history wrote:
> Hi,
>
> a distant in-law recently found a bunch of disks from the early 90's on which they started a memoir and wonder how to get to them again.
>
> This is obviously of general interest, and so wonder whether anyone here on the list has contacts or information in this regard. Which computer museum might still be able to read stiffies/floppies (I assume MS-DOS or early Windows)?
>
> If one could get the files off, the next thing would be to translate them into anything currently readable such as MarkDown, but that depends obviously on the file format.
>
>
> greetings, el
>
>
> --
> Dr. Eberhard W. Lisse \ / Obstetrician & Gynaecologist (retired)
> el at lisse.NA / * | Telephone: +264 81 124 6733 (cell)
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