

To read older formats you will probably need to find a used older machine with the appropriate drive (the Mac Powerbook G3 laptop is my personal favorite). Drives made in the mid to late 1990s were often capable of reading both kinds of disks, but today's USB floppy drives can generally only read high density disks. These older, double density, disks were very similar in appearance to their high density counterparts (usually only distinguishable by the lack of a hole on the upper right hand corner of the disk) however, they depended on a different kind of drive technology. Most 3.5 floppy disks manufactured in the 1980s had only about half the capacity of the high density disks made in later years.

Recommended solution : Purchase older system with proper drive on Ebay Below are a few solutions I've found for some old formats.ħ40K / 800K (Double Density) Floppy Disks Although it is possible to purchase adapters to convert popular old connection types (such as serial, parallel, and SCSI) to USB, finding the appropriate software "drivers" to allow modern computers to run these devices once connected can be very difficult. The modern USB port has only been really common since 1998, and there are a wide range of older devices that never used the format. In many ways, the hardest part about accessing old data is physically connecting old disks to new technology. I suspect over the next few years there may be a couple unhappy souls desperately Googling for ways of accessing data on their old floppy drives, and so I thought I would submit some of my best practices to the corpus of online wisdom to help those future search engine supplicants in whatever way I can. I've written before in various places about the problem this poses for scholars and archivists working with the so-called "born digital" collections in our Library, but many of the tools and techniques I use as a digital curator, I also use to access my own digital history. Occasionally though, I, like most computer users, need to access files left behind on obsolete technology.

Since then I've used floppy disks, zip disks, CD-ROMS, DVD-ROMs, and memory sticks, and with each change I migrated most of my important files to the new format. My family's first computer (a Timex Sinclair 1000 purchased for about $40 in 1984 from our neighborhood grocery store) saved files to an ordinary audio cassette by transferring data over the same sort of cord you might use to connect your iPod to your car stereo. If you've been using computers for a while, you've probably purchased quite a few devices for storing your work.
