Accessing very old Mac files

March 15, 2005 8:15 AM

I have been asked by a friend to open and archive some very, very old Mac files.

The files are on Mac diskettes, date from 1984 through 1989, and appear to be in MacWrite 4.5 and MS Word for Mac 3.0 format. I have a PC with DataViz Conversion Plus. The diskettes will mount in my floppy drive after much grinding, and I can see the files, but DataViz can’t convert files from these formats. I know I could just use Textpad to extract the text from the files. However, if I could burn the files to a CD, are there better conversion options on a modern Mac?

posted by tranquileye to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Whatever you decide, you should immediately copy all the files from that media and put them on your harddisk or a CD-ROM. Maybe this goes without saying, so I don't mean to come off as insulting or anything, but I've just seen so many files vanish as a result of faulty floppies, not even nearly that old, that I can't stress it enough.
posted by odinsdream at 8:38 AM on March 15, 2005

Same company, different product: MacLinkPlus.
posted by AlexReynolds at 8:48 AM on March 15, 2005

The first, most important thing to do is get the data off that fragile media and onto something more stable. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the files aren't recoverable due simply to the age of the diskettes.

The best way to do this is on a Mac running OS 9 (or maybe 8? At some point they dropped support for single-sided floppies, which those '84 disks definitely would be). There may be PC solutions for this, but I don't know what they are.

Extracting text from Word files, in my experience, produces a useless mess. Maybe it's different with Word 3.0. I was going to suggest MacLinkPlus, the Swiss army knife of Mac file conversion, but it looks like their Word support only goes back to version 4. So it seems the best you can do is get your hands on a copy of Word 5 for the Mac, which ought to be able to open all those files (including the MacWrite files) as well as save them into a more modern format (such as RTF).
posted by jjg at 8:57 AM on March 15, 2005

I have Word 4 and 5 for Mac lying about. (I even have a copy of Word 3, but it doesn't run under Classic at all.) Email me if you need my assistance.
posted by ikkyu2 at 9:30 AM on March 15, 2005

A modern version of Word can open those ancient Word files, provided you installed the right converters. I seem to remember pulling a Word file I wrote in 1991 off a Macintosh disk, transfering it to Windows, and successfully opening it with Office XP.

I am surprised that your PC can read Macintosh disks at all. The only Mac disks your PC should be able to read, regardless of your software, are High Density (1.44 MB) disks. High Density came out in the late '80s, I think. The two previous storage formats -- 400k (single-sided) and 800k (double-sided) disks -- required totally different hardware than what you could find in any PC. To read these, you will need an old Mac. I recommend one with a "SuperDrive" (a drive that could read all 3 formats) and System 7.1 to 8.6. With that setup, you can copy the floppies, and then re-copy the files onto a PC disk.
posted by profwhat at 11:23 AM on March 15, 2005

This is a job best left to the pros. Any old-school Mac repair shop (most big cities have at least one) can do this easily and inexpensively; it's actually a pretty common job for them. Floppy recovery could be done on a mail order basis.
posted by MattD at 12:08 PM on March 15, 2005