A Guide to Imaging Obscure Floppy Disk Formats
1st October 2024
carriers like hard drives, optical discs, and flash storage are readily available, the landscape becomes trickier when dealing with older formats such as floppy disks. It is becoming increasingly difficult to source the hardware, such as 5.25”floppy drives. There are many boards that can read flux streams, including the KryoFlux, and the Award-winning Archivist’s Guide to KryoFlux can help to get started. But KryoFlux is somewhat limited in the disk formats it can interpret and might be too expensive for smaller institutions. We came together as practitioners because we encountered disk formats that required additional efforts to read and extract files. We explored hardware such as Greaseweazle and using FluxEngine software to read less common disk formats. Sharing the knowledge we have gained, this tutorial and workshop present an opportunity for participants to delve into these formats, examining them from both hardware and formatting perspectives.
If, of course, that’s what you want to do.
October 1st, 2024 at 16:29
As someone who had to deal with 8″ floppies (on an Intel In Circuit Emulator system), this is like digging up an old graveyard.
In my first job after college, I became the lab’s de facto “computer guy”. When the company decided to go to a Wang word processing system (gag!), the secretary over in the metallurgy department called me and asked if I could help her, as she couldn’t recover any documents she saved on the system’s 5.25″ floppies. I walked over to her office and asked to see the disks. She asked me which one I wanted to start with, and pointed to the wall in front of her desk. The walls were steel panels and she had each of the dozen or so disks she had used pinned on the wall with magnets. Those old Wang systems had a volume knob on the back of the screen. Secretaries were used to using Selectric typewriters, and when they didn’t hear that familiar “click” of the keys, they would double or triple strike letters. We non-secretarial staff were instructed to start with the volume turned all the way up, then slowly turn it down every few days until the secretaries were weaned from the key clicks. The secretaries were given pathetically little training, so it fell on us to also convince them that they shouldn’t correct mistakes with White-Out and try to run the corrected letter back through the Wang printer.
Many things were better in the Good Old Days (like actually having secretaries and receptionists), but some things are better forgotten (like 8 Tracks, Beta tapes, White-Out, carbon paper, floppy disks, etc.)