Floppy Disc & the Geek Squad

Depends on the size of the floppy....The 3.5" discs should not be a problem, but 5-1/4" and 8" ones would be...Not only would they not likely have the hardware, but the information itself would be corrupted to the point of unusability...

FR

For the sake of the story, it would be implausible that a mainstream shop would be able to easily read an old 5 & 1/4 inch floppy disk.

However, the guy behind the counter might be a TRUE geek .. and so be able to do it with his old Apple 2E or Trash-80 .. some old bit of equipment that he has at home. He'd probably explain gleefully the trickiness in transferring the data, while the the MC's eye's glazed over.

The geek would especially do it if the MC is female and he is male!

Mac

Yup. I married a geek who has geek friends. this weekend they were talking about the old computers they still have like treasures to be cherished forever.

BlackViolet13 said:

Is it possible for me to take one to the Geek Squad to have the information transferred from the disc to a flash drive or other media?

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It depends (don't you hate that reply?). I have a newer PowerBook, but I still have an old floppy drive that will work with it. It's the 3.5" drive that was common for many years.

So, first you have to find someone (place) with the right size drive.

But then, you have to be able to open the files. Would the person owning the drive also own the right program (or a program with a translator that would work)? Some of the older programs used to create the documents might not be available today. And, if the files are in a proprietary format I don't know how they would be able to open such documents. Often all you get is garbled junk.

If the files are just plain text, retrieving the docs could be a piece of cake. And Word, for instance, will open many older M$ files (Word, Works, etc).

So those are some of the "depends": if you can find someone with the "right" drive, who also owns a program that can open the files, you'll be all set. Assuming the floppy is still readable.

Call Kinko's, big computer stores, computer repair shops, places like that. They should be able to point you in the right direction.
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As for how long it would take, it would depend on where you end up taking it.

3.5 - sure, you can still BUY those drives. But 5 1/4 truly "FLOPPY" - I doubt it. Miles 111 is dead on regarding the likelyhood of such at a "Best Buy". (I had a Geeksquad friend) BUT you could wrangle it, with believability as he described. The Geek could 'take it home' and do it, or perhaps the Geek is a real afficianado of 'retro-tech' and she's in luck, he does have the old computer there in the store.

It's not impossible, not even improbable - you just have to finesse it.

I've GOT an old compaq in the garage, I think it'll still boot up on Windows 3.5, and it's got the old drive.

This is embarassing. I still have a computer running here that has both 3-1/2 and 5-1/4. I keep it because it still runs and I got old discs.

you can still buy 5-1/4 TEAC's on ebay and they will work up to XP. I don't know anything about Vista but probably.

The old 8", 10" and 12's were proprietary and hopefully mainframe discs are not part of your story. same with reel-reel

As long as your MC's 5.5" isn't in Fortran or Cobol--that could be tricky switching to Word or Works

Or worse, have the document your MC needs to get off the disc turn out to be in Word*Star or Enable.

Some of those old-skool computers are going for thousands of dollars, if you can find one to buy!

Black Violet, a suggestion: why don't you have your computer geek a real "retro old skool" type who shuns the fast-paced modern world in favour of all his old school stuff? Maybe have him so clever that he's worked out how to do it?

Mac H. said:

For the sake of the story, it would be implausible that a mainstream shop would be able to easily read an old 5 & 1/4 inch floppy disk.

However, the guy behind the counter might be a TRUE geek .. and so be able to do it with his old Apple 2E or Trash-80 .. some old bit of equipment that he has at home. He'd probably explain gleefully the trickiness in transferring the data, while the the MC's eye's glazed over.

The geek would especially do it if the MC is female and he is male!

Mac

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Err, no.

Those are both proprietary file systems. That's not gonna work.

BlackViolet13 said:

A blast from the past LOL Remember those huge floppy black discs we used to have to use? Is it possible for me to take one to the Geek Squad to have the information transferred from the disc to a flash drive or other media?

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If you specifiy that it's DOS, you'll have a more believable context.

There are file transfer services and lots of geeks with old hardware and software.

I'm umm . .. well.

I could do it.

Medievalist said:

I'm umm . .. well.

I could do it.

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I knew we were the perfect couple

You can bet your bottom dollar most of the workers at Best Buy have never SEEN a 5 1/4" floppy disk since they were in diapers. Most were dumped onto the Goodwill front door when they were in elementary school. And the IBM PC didn't come out until 1980, so anything else around or before that time using that size floppy would be basically unreadable by any other system (though I recall seeing a program on a Kaypro II that would read about 25-35 different CP/M disk formats (5 1/4" only, I didn't hear of anyone hooking an 8" drive to a Kaypro, though it was probably possible). Some drives CAN read other "proprietary" formats such as the Apple ][ or the Tandy - at least these ARE documented (though perhaps they intentionally weren't at the time they came out, I suspect all disk/file formats were eventually reverse-engineered. I've seen very detailed info on the Apple ][ format. It's an amazing story: Wozniak, not knowing any better, put much of the "disk controller" functionality in software, saving money over other disk drive interfaces), and sometimes a drive controller can be reprogrammed to read another file format. Worst case, a old computer freak person offering a conversion service would have a computer that wrote and read the format, and could do a serial port binary transfer to a modern computer to burn a CD on.

And even with "IBM PC Format 5 1/4" floppy" you've got the original 160k/180k/320k/360k formats, then the 1.2 meg IBM AT format (I still got one of those AT drives in a 200Mhz Pentium machine) that if you used that drive to WRITE to a 360k or lower-formatted disk, the track width it writes is smaller than the original drive, which then wouldn't read the floppy anymore. Semi-compatibility is one of life's little complications...

But MAYBE the Best-Buy manager is an old crusty person (kinda like me) who is old enough to remember USING 5 1/4" floppies, and just happens to have heard something about "format conversion" services, and could refer your character.

And the same guy who does this service (he can even read those 8" CP/M floppies, though I recall there were some proprietary microcomputer OS's that used those too. (Polymorphic Systems comes to mind, the computer store I worked at in college sold one to a writer who had a helluva time with computers with at least one "it ate my novel" story, but in spite of it managed to write and publish "Sharky's Machine"). And those 8" floppies were originally made by IBM for mainframes!), well...

Where was I? Oh, that same guy can convert your old BETA videocassette to any format you want: "Whatcha want it on? Old-fashioned DVD, HD-DVD (R.I.P), Blu-Ray, CD-video, mpeg on a CD or DVD data disc, VHS, U-Matic?" He might even be a freak and have one of the original Ampex videotape recorders first used by the TV networks, and can play back "original" copies of The Ed Sullivan Show.

Sorry you asked yet? I haven't even mentioned LP's, 45's 8-tracks, 78's, acetates (usually the brand is "AudioDisc"), nor Edison cylinders. I have the equipment to play back most of those...

Ben, your technical blast from the past...

There are three basic issues here:

1. Hardware that can "read" the data on the disk; I'd go with an Old DOS drive and computer.
2. Once you have the data read, and transferred to modern media, you still need to be able to interpret the data. The format of the data file -- what is it? A word processor file? A database? A spreadsheet? Word Perfect pretty much owned the word processor world, but there were alternatives. The file needs to be "translated" to something modern, and then likely will still need some basic formatting.

I'd say a Lotus spreadsheet. Which would have been created on a computer running DOS and an old version of Lotus, which would then be translated to a tab delimited text file, and brought into Excel.

Sorry for butting in, but this thread is fascinating. I had an old Tandy with a cassette tape drive.

bluntforcetrauma said:

Sorry for butting in, but this thread is fascinating. I had an old Tandy with a cassette tape drive.

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That would have been a TRS-80, I reckon, fondly called a Trash-80

BlackViolet13 said:

Butt right in, I'm loving it too. I don't remember having a cassette drive on the one we had. Did you mix music with yours?

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No, I didn't. The portable cassette player connected with a couple of cables and the cassette was the memory, I think. I do believe it was a TRS 80. I remember programming a blinking Christmas tree onscreen per the manual's instructions. It was a horrible machine. Not much more than a glorified calculator.


I just found it on the web. It's a TRS 80 Color Computer 2. Here's the info and a pic.