I found this old software on a medium I don't recognize at my church. Does anyone know if this has value to anybody?
this
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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Yeah, as others have said, floppies without cases.
Just to be clear, floppy cases were never meant to be removed. They were glued together in such a way that it wasn't possible to take the case off without breaking the case. And these disks can't be read without the cases. Basically, the cases were considered part of the disk (just like the plastic casing of a an audio cassette or VHS is integral to the functioning of the medium.) I have to imagine whoever took these out of their cases had a misunderstanding about how computers on the order of thinking a CD-ROM tray is a drink holder or trying to print a document by laying the monitor face-down on the bed of a copy machine.
If you wanted to read the 3.5" disks, you might be able to do so if you can procure a proper floppy drive and some sacrificial floppy disks. It'd probably take some finesse and careful gluing skills.
But that all assumes that these disks haven't lost their data already. Floppies tend to just plain old degrade over time. So the data very is very likely heavily corrupted.
I have heard of really specialized hardware to read data off of degraded disks, but that's probably "you have to know a guy/gal" level of specialization. If you really wanted to go that route, I think you'd probably want to know if what you have there is "valuable" (basically not already available on Archive.org and also interesting like unreleased source code or something.) But if you thought you had something like that and wanted to pursue it, you could @ Jason Scott (@textfiles@mastodon.archive.org) on Mastodon. If anybody has a lead on how to read those, it's him.
They were probably disassembled for showcase. They weren't the most resilient of things and eventually enough area of the disk would degrade as to make the disk unusable. Eventually as in, really fast. Every office had a pile of defective floppies marked as corrupted to prevent people from losing their data to them. Essentially you could format and write on them but reading was impossible or returned garbled data. They were comonly disassembled to showcase how they worked and to experiment as they were a cheap source of ferromagnetic coated cellulose.
or arts and grafts. someone might had an idea for either the cases or the discs themselves and the dics wouldnt work so they saved them for later. and now he we are at a later date...
@TootSweet @TheScribbler what monster did this
Jason Scott! I can't express how honored I am that your apparently first post on Lemmy is a response to me!
Also, yes, monstrous. ;)
We can thank the beauty of ActivityPub to let people reply across multiple platforms.
One more interesting feature was the "write lock" switch on the 3.5" ones, a sliding button that covered one of the squared holes on their edges. The floppy drive would sense that and refuse to write on them.
On the 5.25" it was a notch cut on the side (there were punchers for that). To write on a "protected" disk, you'd cover the notch with adhesive tape.
They can probably be read if you thrown them into another case. I used to rip them apart and put them back together as a kid.
I have floppy disks containing Bungie's game Marathon for the Mac. 3 out of 4 I've been successful in dumping onto the PC but one is giving me trouble. Would Jason Scott be the person to ask about recovering the data from the disk?
If anyone can point you in the right direction, it's probably Jason Scott. And it appears I've conjured him.
The process of recovering that disk may involve a long drive to one of a very few people in the world with specialized hardware for that purpose.
One thing you might want to do, though, is check Archive.org to see if they have that disk. You might just be able to get that data there. If they don't have that disk and you do manage to recover it (or even if you don't manage to recover the final disk and can only get images of 3 out of 4) do consider uploading disk images to Archive.org .
(This from someone who has an old 3rd-party collection of Sim City 2000 cities on CD that was sold in stores that I've been planning to image and upload but haven't yet. I'll get to it soon, though!)