Carol wrote:
Looking for a drive that can read 800K Mac floppies and output files
to a Macbook Pro, e.g. by USB port.
I have a few 10-year-old disks (800K, not HD) that have versions of my
late father's memoirs. Might be able to find an old Mac that could
read the disks, but output could be a problem unless, say, it had net
access so I could email the files to myself.
Tried Other World Computinghttp://www.macsales.com/ but can't find
such a drive on their site. Customer Service says to try Technical
Service during business hours, which I can't do until next week.
I have hardcopy of the memoirs but not a file. Maybe I should get
busy typing. :-}
---------------
It was for something like this that, over a year ago, I bought a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M sheetfed scanner. This is an amazing piece of equipment. It scans both sides of a page at once, if set to do that, and goes with the speed of light. My family archives are now mostly scanned. This scanner is not cheap, but it comes with Mac software (Adobe Acrobat Professional) and also OCR software to convert to .rtf which Word or Pages could read. The scanner is also great for reducing the amount of paper you are keeping around. There are two versions of the scanner, one for Windows and one for Mac. I bought my Mac version from Amazon.
Regarding the floppy drive, I have an external USB floppy drive (also bought from Amazon) which I know works on the HD floppies but no longer have any of the 800 K disks so I don't know if it will also read those. Depending on what software was used to write your father's memoirs, you still might have a problem reading them, even if you found a floppy drive for the disks. Since you do have hard copies, it might be best to go the scanning route.
I only had to retype one thing while scanning all this family stuff. That was a series of letters written from England and printed on thermal paper which faded over time. They were still dark enough to read but not dark enough to scan. At least i got to them in time.
Mary
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
