Reading 5.25" disks

Oldhack

Does anyone know where I could find a computer or drive to read old 5.25" disks?

2cool4school

1982

Ruu_Old

Buy an auld computer on eBay is probably your best bet.

bullets

Cant help you read your disk but its interesting to note
that a Company here in Ireland is currently designing a Microchip that is going to be used on one of the latest Apple products and the very very very sad state of affairs is there is a machine someplace in the factory that could possibly be used to test this IC before it finally gets made and one of the machines still uses data loaded from a 5.25" Floppy disc. Thats pretty scary

~B

dj jarvis

bullets wrote: »

Cant help you read your disk but its interesting to note
that a Company here in Ireland is currently designing a Microchip that is going to be used on one of the latest Apple products and the very very very sad state of affairs is there is a machine someplace in the factory that could possibly be used to test this IC before it finally gets made and one of the machines still uses data loaded from a 5.25" Floppy disc. Thats pretty scary

~B

why is that scary ?
if the device recording/transmitting and the media are in good shape it takes the information as any modern device would , a lot slower but if they have redundancy cant see the problem really

i work with many legacy systems and your toes would curl if you knew some of the critical servers i work on that run NT on archaic box's , im talking ISA ports and interrupt requests a go go , once you have spare parts and back up its no problem , most apps take little resources to run so old hardware can do it no problem

cml387

One of our engineers here who is departing has an 8" floppy disk kept for souvenir purposes.

Hank Scorpio

Buy an adapter for your current pc

Oldhack

nuxxx wrote: »

Buy an adapter for your current pc

But what kind of adapter? There are plug-in drives for 3.5" discs but I haven't come across any for 5.25" discs.

Hank Scorpio

Oldhack wrote: »

But what kind of adapter? There are plug-in drives for 3.5" discs but I haven't come across any for 5.25" discs.

Something like this?

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/NEW-SEAGATE-5-25-TAPE-DRIVE-ADAPTER-KIT-BOXED-/350459809436?pt=UK_Computing_Networking_SM&hash=item5199084e9c

Run_to_da_hills

bullets wrote: »

Cant help you read your disk but its interesting to note
that a Company here in Ireland is currently designing a Microchip that is going to be used on one of the latest Apple products and the very very very sad state of affairs is there is a machine someplace in the factory that could possibly be used to test this IC before it finally gets made and one of the machines still uses data loaded from a 5.25" Floppy disc. Thats pretty scary

~B

From what I believe, the Space Shuttle's general purpose computer runs on just one meg of ram which controls, among other things, the entire launch sequence. It is an upgrade of the 500-kilobyte computer the shuttle flew with until 1991. :eek:

L1011

nuxxx wrote: »

Something like this?

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/NEW-SEAGATE-5-25-TAPE-DRIVE-ADAPTER-KIT-BOXED-/350459809436?pt=UK_Computing_Networking_SM&hash=item5199084e9c

Completely and utterly useless; that is a mounting kit to put a Seagate tap drive in a 5.25" slot. Do you even know what he's referring to?

There are no adapters. a 5.25" inch floppy drive will connect to the floppy controller that any PC made from the 1980s until a few years ago.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ND-0801GR-TOSHIBA-5-25-FLOPPY-DISK-DRIVE-5-1-4-/190512399161?pt=PCC_Drives_Storage_Internal&hash=item2c5b6c8339#ht_1727wt_905

is something that will work.