Formatting a 100MB ZIP Disk by Jambohaha / March 8, 2006 6:18 AM PST I have not been able to find one person that can tell me how to 'Format' a FujiFilm ZIP, IBM Formatted, 100MB DISK.
In August 1984, my parents bought an Apple IIe for about $2,500, making them one of the first on the block to own a personal computer. Like me, Mom is also a writer, so she spent many an hour typing (at warp speed) on the IIe's clickety-clackety keyboard as I busied myself with Crystal Barbie and her kingdom.
Eventually, the Apple IIe and its green screen were traded in for a Windows-based PC and the magic of solitaire and flying toaster screensavers. Mom's Apple IIe disks were relegated to a box in the corner of an attic and largely forgotten, until recently. 'Is it possible to find out what I had on these disks?' she asked me last month.
These days, optical drives are almost a thing of the past, let alone a floppy drive, so it can be difficult to extract content from ancient disks without the right equipment. Perhaps in the dark recesses of the PCMag Labs, we have equipment capable of performing such tasks, but I was not about to go digging.
Fortunately, there are services that will extract your files from old disks for a relatively affordable fee. In Mom's case, we shipped her two, 5.25-inch diskettes to RetroFloppy, who put her files on a CD and emailed a digital download within a few days for about $20 total.
RetroFloppy's David Schmidt started his site in 2006 after a woman in an online forum requested help getting files off a Commodore 128. This woman's brother had passed away, and she could not access some pieces he had written. 'I thought, 'I can do that, and I bet others have that need as well...' and those remain my most valued clients,' Schmidt said in an email to PCMag. 'Ones wanting to make those intangible memories from lost loved ones a little more real.'
Schmidt's client base is a mix of law firms, college, and libraries that can 'clock in at hundreds of disks at once' to those like my Mom, who just need one or two items recovered.
'Many of the requests are for almost-modern, one-or-two disks - people looking to rescue their resumes, college papers, or Great American Novels from disks they just don't have drives for any more,' Schmidt said. 'The tricky element there is converting their files to readable formats - there were a LOT of word processors in use over the years, and making them all accessible today is no mean feat.'
On any given day, Schmidt might be working on a 'college thesis that needs to be extracted from TRS-80 floppies, a famous rock band [that] needs video footage from an obscure magneto-optical disc, or an industry luminary ... looking to pull files from a rare version of CP/M that could write to 3-1/2 disks. We can handle pretty much anything that comes our way on rotating media.'
For now, RetroFloppy is a part-time gig, Schmidt said, primarily because specialized hardware and software makes the actual conversion a breeze. 'Maybe it will be 'full time' when retirement comes - or maybe it will become irrelevant, because no one will need information from old disks any more,' he said. 'Even CD drives are becoming extinct. External, personal storage is moving to hard drives - or to the cloud. Hardly even tangible.'
So how can you get your disks converted? Read on to find out how you submit your ancient hardware to a service like RetroFloppy, or do a little handiwork yourself.