[l008com]

Can an OS 9 Machine with a floppy drive (figure like an old performa) read Apple II formatted discs? I need to recover data from an Apple II floppy to a modern computer and I'm not sure if that will read the disc or not?

[l008com]

Yes, it can. It was an OS 8 machine i used, not OS 9. An old old oooooold pppower book. Then I just etherneted it to my ibook, and emailed it to this guy. Good think I don' throw my old stuff away!

[Love Calm Quiet]

Resurrecting this issue:
So my AlBook cannot startup using Sys 9, but if I can find an old piece of hardware and reboot into 9, should it also be able to read Apple II ? (I've got floppies from a friend who said her disk were from a defunct "Apple GS" -- is that an Apple II? or, in general, are Apple GS disks something that SOME sort of current Mac (with a USB floppy drive attached) should be able to read?

[olePigeon]

Originally Posted by Love Calm Quiet

Resurrecting this issue:
So my AlBook cannot startup using Sys 9, but if I can find an old piece of hardware and reboot into 9, should it also be able to read Apple II ? (I've got floppies from a friend who said her disk were from a defunct "Apple GS" -- is that an Apple II? or, in general, are Apple GS disks something that SOME sort of current Mac (with a USB floppy drive attached) should be able to read?

The Apple IIGS was sort of inbetween the IIe and the Macintosh. Actually, I'm not sure why they released it when the Macintosh was going to be out anyway.

It'll depend on the disk from the IIGS. If it's an 800K, you might be in luck. If it's the older 400K (that doesn't sound right, but the smaller than 720/800K floppy) I don't know if it'll work. I've never tried.

[tooki]

An Apple IIgs used 400 and 800K floppies. Both are readable using Mac OS 9 and earlier on internal floppy drives. USB floppy drives can't handle the format.

tooki

[Love Calm Quiet]

Thanks, Tooki...
Yes I found that my old Tibook (booted in 9.2) thought the floppies (via USB) were either unreadable DOS disks which it volunteered to initialize or showed a "PC" floppy icon that opened as having 1.3 MB available.

It would be TMI to find out how in the world you knew details of Apple GS & USB floppy drives: I feel your pain!

Now... if I can just find the internal floppy that goes in this Pismo...

[finboy]

Originally Posted by Love Calm Quiet

Thanks, Tooki...
Yes I found that my old Tibook (booted in 9.2) thought the floppies (via USB) were either unreadable DOS disks which it volunteered to initialize or showed a "PC" floppy icon that opened as having 1.3 MB available.

It would be TMI to find out how in the world you knew details of Apple GS & USB floppy drives: I feel your pain!

Now... if I can just find the internal floppy that goes in this Pismo...

WegenerMedia.com and other places have the LS-120 drive that will act as an internal floppy, but I'm not sure that it will read 800k disks or 400k disks, for the same reason that USB floppies won't. Sorry that I don't have anything to try with. Pismos never came with a floppy, nor did the Lombard. Wall Streets had them, but they're hard to find, and I'm not sure they'll read the old formats. A 5300 will, but if I were you I'd just find an old LC or Performa to hook up and transfer it that way.

I still use a 5400/G3 for floppy stuff, especially generating images of older software to use for installing on machines that don't have floppies. Hail FoxPro (hail yeah).

Good luck.

[Love Calm Quiet]

Yes, Finboy...
I'm thinking of my even older-than-Pismo Wallstreet...
Now, didn't I keep even ONE of those ancient ones around (I've had at least 20 diff since my old 512 Fat Mac, but wifey wouldn't see to moving the whole museum across country)

[SVass]

I still have an Apple IIGS with a 3 1/2" floppy drive that hasn't been turned on since around 1988. Reading the files from the floppies might require an old version of MacLink or its free product, File View. sam

[Love Calm Quiet]

Hmmm...
These aren't MY floppies, and I don't know how valuable they are to the owner, but...
Sam, Have you considered opening a business converting old IIGS files

[tooki]

Originally Posted by Love Calm Quiet

Thanks, Tooki...
Yes I found that my old Tibook (booted in 9.2) thought the floppies (via USB) were either unreadable DOS disks which it volunteered to initialize or showed a "PC" floppy icon that opened as having 1.3 MB available.

It would be TMI to find out how in the world you knew details of Apple GS & USB floppy drives: I feel your pain!

Now... if I can just find the internal floppy that goes in this Pismo...

There never was an internal floppy for the Pismo. The last PowerBook to have internal floppy was the Wallstreet. (And actually, some PowerBooks came with external drives that would work for this purpose -- but they predate USB.)


Anyhow, I accept the challenge and will explain:

A disk needs a certain amount of area to write a piece of data. In a standard floppy disk, the disk is broken into concentric "tracks", and the disk is also broken into pie sliced "sectors". Each sector on a track holds the same amount of data. Well, as you well know, the first bite of pie (from the center) is very small, while the outside crust is very large.

Like this:


Steve Wozniak realized "hmmm, the outer tracks have a lot more space than the inner ones." So rather than have each track contain the same number of sectors (while clearly the surface area of the innermost track was sufficient to hold one sector), he made Apple's floppy formats put more sectors per track as you moved toward the edge: each sector was now the same size. This increased capacity by over 10%. (This method is called "zoned bit recording", and is now used universally on hard disks.)

Like so:


It also required a more capable floppy drive that could spin the disk at various speeds, something not normally done with floppy disks.

And that is what made Apple floppy drives special, as far as hardware is concerned: the ability to vary the rotational speed to maintain a constant data rate as the number of sectors per track increased ("Constant Linear Velocity").

This method was used in the 400KB (ProDOS and MFS) and 800KB (ProDOS and HFS) floppy disks. (The same disks formatted on a PC rendered only 360 and 720KB, resp.) For reasons unknown to me, this efficient method was abandoned with high-density disks, so a Mac high-density disk and a PC one both format to about 1440KB.

Since a drive that can handle multiple speeds is also capable of running at just one speed, Apple drives can also read PC-formatted disks, while the reverse is not true.

USB floppy drives were all designed solely with PCs in mind, so they do not support variable rotational speed -- they see the disk as an unformatted disk. This is why you need a "real" Mac floppy drive to read the old disks.

Wikipedia has a paragraph on this (with typical slight anti-Apple bias, of course).

Originally Posted by finboy

WegenerMedia.com and other places have the LS-120 drive that will act as an internal floppy, but I'm not sure that it will read 800k disks or 400k disks, for the same reason that USB floppies won't.

The only LS-120 sold for Macs was USB, but yeah, even if you installed one internally, it wouldn't work, because these, too, don't support the Apple variable-rotational-speed mode.

[A note on the pictures: these are from PCGuide.com's fantastic hard disk reference. Though the images show old hard disk platters, the principles are identical.

tooki

[Love Calm Quiet]

Thanks, Tooki. Very cool bit of history: and the "picture is worth a thousand words"

Now... if only my step-dau still has my old Wallstreet...

[finboy]

Originally Posted by tooki

The only LS-120 sold for Macs was USB, but yeah, even if you installed one internally, it wouldn't work, because these, too, don't support the Apple variable-rotational-speed mode.

Won't work for this application, but the LS-120 for Pismo exists. Made by VST (called the Super Disk). I have one on my desk right now .

[tooki]

Oh, right! I forgot about the expansion bay version!

tooki

[Big Mac]

That was an excellent primer on floppy drive technology. So there is no company left making a variable speed floppy drive?

[tooki]

As far as I know, they were only ever custom-made for Apple (and the Mac clone makers for that brief spell). I know of no other computer that used them.

tooki

[macsfromnowon]

Shame about demise of the floppy, huh? Of course I scarcely have any file under 1.4MB these days.
Have to break down and get USB Flash Mem some day.

[tooki]

No, it's no shame. Anything small enough to fit on a floppy can now be emailed, and anything bigger than fits on a floppy can go on a 5¢ CD, or onto a speedy thumb drive.

tooki