[mattcass]

I hope all of you remember the little Macintosh Classic. That wonderful little grey box with a blue screen that filled the computer labs of elementary schools. Well, mine at least.

My mom uses one, and has used it since we first bought it back in 1991. She's a doctor and does all her letters and such on it and over the years has built up quite the collection of documents on the Classic. This Christmas I figured that as great as the Classic is for her she could do a little better. I bought her a 12" iBook and today she just started to use it. She's obviously a little overwhelmed with good reason.

THE SOFTWARE QUESTION:

Is there any chance that the files on the Classic would be transferable to the iBook? There's obviously no floppy drive on the iBook and sure as hell no cd-rom on the Classic but I'm sure there are products out there to get around that. All the documents on the Classic were made with Symantec GreatWorks and the iBook has Microsoft Office. Some of the letters on the Classic are important and my mom needs them. Could the Classic files be read as text files?

If someone could help or tell me to forget about this whole thing because it's impossible please do so. If details of the Symantec software are needed or the OS of the Classic just ask and I'll find out.

Thanks

[Spheric Harlot]

If Greatworks has an "Export..." function, you might be able to export to some useful format. This might also be available as options in the "Save As..." dialog.

put the docs on a floppy and find someone with a floppy drive and a CD burner.

Or just find someone with a Mac-disk capable floppy drive to email them to your mom.

[barney ntd]

Buy a usb floppy drive on ebay. They cost almost nothing.

[hudson1]

Originally posted by barney ntd:
Buy a usb floppy drive on ebay. They cost almost nothing.

Not so fast. I don't know if there is such a thing as a USB floppy drive that reads 800K disks. I'm almost certain that the Classic only writes to 800K disks, not 1.4MB disks.

UPDATE: I was definitely wrong. The Macintosh Classic has a 1.44MB floppy drive so the USB drive idea should work.

[CharlesS]

Two options:

1 (cheap but annoying): Get a USB floppy drive and transfer all the files via floppy from the Classic to the iBook. This is a pain, though, since if you have a lot of files you may end up spending quite a lot of time swapping floppies.

2 (more expensive): Get an Ethernet-to-LocalTalk converter and use it to network the Classic to the iBook and transfer the files via file sharing. This is more expensive (about $99), but you can just drag all the files, get it started, and then go do something else and let it go until it finishes. Plus, if you ever need to network the two machines together again in the future, you can do so.