[IAEP] Looking for very old hardware

[Jonas Smedegaard]

On Fri, Aug 07, 2009 at 05:03:33PM +0200, Sascha Silbe wrote:
>On Thu, Aug 06, 2009 at 02:55:33PM -0700, Caryl Bigenho wrote:
>
>>I would like very much to be able to put these old 5 1/2" floppies 
>>in, boot them up and print out the code so some enterprising Python 
>>programmer could convert them for Sugar.  I'm not even sure the 
>>disks will still work.  They are probably 20+ years old.
>Sorry to be unhelpful, but I doubt those floppies still work. I have 
>thrown away all my 3.5" disks some years ago because they all had 
>errors, and the 5.25" ones long before. Disks usually last about 5 
>years, maybe 10 if you're lucky (depends on magnetic fields in the 
>vicinity, including the earth magnetic field).
>If you've got a chance go and try, but I wouldn't recommend spending 
>any money on it.

If you choose to try anyway, despite the warnings of the floppies being 
too old, then this site looks like could be better than ebay: 
http://www.retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/m_parts.html

I still have various Mac hardware as old as a PowerBook 1xx with 
external 3.5" drive, and also have some PC 5.25" but according to some 
web pages they cannot read Macintosh floppies (as they are not variable 
speed drives as Apple used back then, berfore the "Superdrives).

...also, I live in Denmark and wouldn't recommend sending those old 
floppies by snail mail...


Good luck!

  - Jonas


-- 
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt
* Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

  [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 835 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/attachments/20090808/823ac7f9/attachment.pgp