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External 5.25 floppy usb drive or another way?
4wd:
RetroFloppy folks responded to an email right away, and will try to read both of my disks and make contents available for me to download for $20. Very fair. I'm sending my disks to them. :up: :up:
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-mouser (August 17, 2016, 03:25 PM)
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Make a photocopy of them first, b4 u send them - just in case.
-IainB (August 18, 2016, 03:42 AM)
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That's silly, everyone knows the best method is to read them with an electromagnet and then reverse the polarity to write them out on to new blank media.
wraith808:
RetroFloppy folks responded to an email right away, and will try to read both of my disks and make contents available for me to download for $20. Very fair. I'm sending my disks to them. :up: :up:
______________________
-mouser (August 17, 2016, 03:25 PM)
--- End quote ---
Make a photocopy of them first, b4 u send them - just in case.
-IainB (August 18, 2016, 03:42 AM)
--- End quote ---
That's silly, everyone knows the best method is to read them with an electromagnet and then reverse the polarity to write them out on to new blank media.
-4wd (August 18, 2016, 06:41 AM)
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Just send them unsecured through the postal service. Same effect, less effort. ;D
MilesAhead:
RetroFloppy
-mouser (August 17, 2016, 03:25 PM)
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Now there's a way to make a buck with obsolete hardware and software. Good for them. :)
xtabber:
As it happens, this month marks the 35th anniversary of the IBM 5150 computer, better known as the IBM PC, which made the 5 1/4 inch DOS format floppy disk ubiquitous. The drives in that system were full-height single sided Shugarts with a maximum capacity of 360kb!!!
Prior to that, CP/M was the dominant operating system in microcomputers (as they were known) and each vendor typically had their own proprietary format. Although I used 8 inch floppies myself, I had a disk conversion system with dual 5.25 floppy drives attached to a CompuPro 816 so that I could provide data in whatever format my clients needed for their own systems. I recall that it supported over 100 different formats. By 1986, all that was history and certainly not lamented.
MilesAhead:
As it happens, this month marks the 35th anniversary of the IBM 5150 computer, better known as the IBM PC, which made the 5 1/4 inch DOS format floppy disk ubiquitous. The drives in that system were full-height single sided Shugarts with a maximum capacity of 360kb!!!
Prior to that, CP/M was the dominant operating system in microcomputers (as they were known) and each vendor typically had their own proprietary format. Although I used 8 inch floppies myself, I had a disk conversion system with dual 5.25 floppy drives attached to a CompuPro 816 so that I could provide data in whatever format my clients needed for their own systems. I recall that it supported over 100 different formats. By 1986, all that was history and certainly not lamented.
-xtabber (August 18, 2016, 03:01 PM)
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I just took a computer repair class at Miami Dade College. The professor was quite cool. He always built his own systems. I believe he said he started with the Altair 8800. When he multi-boots systems he always has a dedicated physical drive for each OS. He claimed that mixing flavors of Windows is easy as long as you install in the order the OSes were released. That way each successive installer formats the new blank HD/SSD and adds the older OSes to the boot menu. According to him you do not need to know all the ins and outs of GPT vs MBR as long as you install in the proper succession.
He was also a programmer. From the old punch card/tape programs to assembler, VB and C++. I got into the game very late with my Leading Edge Model D. But as you say, it had a single sided 5 1/4" floppy with 360 KB capacity. The HD was only 30 MB and was noisy and slow. My brother took that one out (we went 50/50 on the PC and printer) and installed a 65 MB Seagate. I brought the ram up from 512 KB to 640 KB. One thing I will say, I had no break out switch. When I was playing with TSRs and device drivers in ASM and locking the thing up, cycling the power never bothered it. In fact somewhere on Youtube there is a video of a still working Leading Edge. Twin floppies but no HD in that one. He boots it in the video to show it comes up to the command line.
One thing about Dos it kind of put everyone on the same playing field. You could write demo/proof of concept programs on your 8088 based machine as well as the guy with the 80286.
Ah the good old days. :)
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