Alan’s big fat floppy adventure

Remember 3.5-inch floppy disks?

While poking around the basement this morning, I found an old USB-attachable 3.5-inch drive. It came with a server— I forget which one — right around the time when servers stopped including floppy drives. This particular server manufacturer included a USB floppy drive to assist in loading up device drivers or booting up an operating system.

Looking at the drive, I thought to myself, “Hmm, I wonder if this will help me clear out that ancient box of floppy disks.”

For about 15 years, I’ve had a big box of DOS floppy disks, containing old articles, financial data, and so-on. It would be nice to bring those files onto my computer, and toss out the floppies.

To make a long story short: It worked. Even though those disks are ancient (dating from 1989 to 1996, according to my neatly written labels), my MacBook Pro and the TEAC FD-05PUB “External Floppy Disk Drive Unit” were able to read nearly all of them. It took under an hour to copy everything over.

The only disks that were not readable were three single-sided floppies. Oh, well!

More interesting was that it was easy to read the data. Nearly all were archives, created either by ARC or PKZIP. Many were not readable by the Mac’s built-in zip-file reader, but were rapidly processed by Stuff-It Expander. Some of the files were plain text or Word for DOS documents, and others were Excel spreadsheets — and there were even Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets. The most intriguing is a big text file containing CompuServe mail archives from 1990. Can’t wait to browse through those memories.

After I was done, I mangled the floppies using tin snips, and then tossed them into the trash. If I could read the data, so could anyone else.

The only challenge is that my floppy disk box still contains media. There are still 15 5.25-inch floppies, containing even older data from the mid-1980s, as well as six Iomega Zip-100 disks with data from the late 1990s. What am I going to do with those?