31–40 of 43 posts
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If you have important Mac disks to archive, then a Kryoflux is probably the way to go. It's a external USB attached floppy drive controller that uses a normal PC floppy drive. It reads the raw disk stream and software then decodes that for whatever disk format it was. It seems old Mac disks can be recovered with it: https://www.kryoflux.com/?page=home http://forum.kryoflux.com/viewtopic.php?t=135
Also https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle
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Per Wikipedia, early ST's floppies were 360K even though it came out a year after the Macintosh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST#Floppy_drive Hardware got better really quickly in the 1980's and 90's, including floppy disks. By the end of the 20th century, there were 120MB floppies. Basically Moore's Law seemed to apply to spinning rust for awhile.
> By the end of the 20th century, there were 120MB floppies In the form of Zip disks, yes. I’m reasonably sure 3.5” disks, the last thing to be called “floppies”, topped out at 2.88M.
It had a 'click of death'-like failure like Zip did though, and lost the battle during its recall and redesign. (IOMEGA were lucky in that the click of death didn't really kill Zip's market until about the time that CDR/CDRW was beating them anyway)
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Right, I forgot about flopticals… but I guess almost everyone else did too. NeXT boxes had those, didn’t they?
Almost all digital formats die in obscurity. 3” floppies, 5v SmartMedia, Jazz disks, and DAT were good ideas in the moment that were not good ideas a moment later. The logistics of reading even popular formats like Qic 40 and ADAT today are hard.
It was delayed so long that by the time it actually reached the market it didn't get noticed.
It's interesting how much of the (latency sensitive) data processing is done on the main CPU; I've not used early Macs much, but given they have a multitasking GUI, would user input be noticeably delayed during disk activity, or could it cause problems to e.g. move the mouse rapidly while it was accessing the disk? 16 CPU cycles per bit sounds like it wouldn't leave much time for anything else.
Does anyone make a usb floppy drive capable of reading Mac disks? I would be willing to pay quite a lot for one.
There were USB drives that sold for iMacs,but the ability to read MFS (400 and800k) floppies disappeared soon afterwards..
Feels slightly surprising, at least from the comfort of my 21st century armchair, that they went to all that effort for 800 KB per disk. The Atari ST (with an off the shelf 1772 FDC) had no problem with 800 KB - 2 sides, 80 tracks, 10 sectors per track, 512 bytes per sector - and that seemed perfectly reliable. The Amiga did its own thing, same as the Mac, but at least it got some extra storage. 880 KB per disk! (880…
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Nope, NeXT had magneto-optical 128 MB drives, somewhat related. They were 3.5" but using an entirely different media, and were absolutely incompatible with ordinary floppies.
NeXT cubes used a 256 Mb optial drive, and some slabs has. 128Mb optical, and someone said that the turbo color slab had a 230Mb optical drive. Mine did not.
Does anyone make a usb floppy drive capable of reading Mac disks? I would be willing to pay quite a lot for one.
If you have important Mac disks to archive, then a Kryoflux is probably the way to go. It's a external USB attached floppy drive controller that uses a normal PC floppy drive. It reads the raw disk stream and software then decodes that for whatever disk format it was. It seems old Mac disks can be recovered with it: https://www.kryoflux.com/?page=home http://forum.kryoflux.com/viewtopic.php?t=135
Apple got Sony to make cav drives, (MacIIx and SE HD to the 9600 )and when they raised the price, no floppy. Sneaker net was over until USB drives became cheap.
One disk on archive that is unrecoverable is Adobe Type Manager. The areas where the fonts are is corrupted, but the data is available elsewhere, but the program isn't.
Now it sits in the cloud ( someone else's hard disk ) in a corrupted state. Wish I had an SE 30 to restore the disk, and put it's compressed image up as a replacement.
Does anyone make a usb floppy drive capable of reading Mac disks? I would be willing to pay quite a lot for one.
If you have important Mac disks to archive, then a Kryoflux is probably the way to go. It's a external USB attached floppy drive controller that uses a normal PC floppy drive. It reads the raw disk stream and software then decodes that for whatever disk format it was. It seems old Mac disks can be recovered with it: https://www.kryoflux.com/?page=home http://forum.kryoflux.com/viewtopic.php?t=135
It does not show how kryoflux assists in recovery. They can be archived, and preserved, but not recovered. ( Just try the 800k ATM disk on archive.org )
Does anyone make a usb floppy drive capable of reading Mac disks? I would be willing to pay quite a lot for one.
Or you can get something like a Greaseweazle[1] and go that route if you want to do more advanced extraction.