TweedyF Posted July 27, 2020 Report Share Posted July 27, 2020 A fellow on my local Craigslist sold me what must be at least 200 floppies full of Mac software from the late 80's/early 90's for $5 this week. Most of them are 800k disks. There's even a (sadly overwritten and written on) official LisaDraw floppy! Nuts! I'm going to slowly image and stuff what's on all of these and find out where best to archive them online. Will store and share as I can – and if there are any real gems along the way, I'll post about them here specially! Quote Link to post Share on other sites
68kMLA Supporter erichelgeson Posted July 27, 2020 68kMLA Supporter Report Share Posted July 27, 2020 Wow! Hope there's one or two versions of things not uploaded to the garden yet. I recently went through about 70 800k disks and 25% of them were unreadable - be interested in your % bad after you've gone threw them. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
68kMLA Supporter cheesestraws Posted July 27, 2020 68kMLA Supporter Report Share Posted July 27, 2020 Can't wait to see what you have here! Quote Link to post Share on other sites
68kMLA Supporter joethezombie Posted July 27, 2020 68kMLA Supporter Report Share Posted July 27, 2020 Awesome! And subscribed! Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Mu0n Posted July 27, 2020 Report Share Posted July 27, 2020 Would love it if you found Studio Session song files (or from other similar composition software like concertware), or VideoWorks animations, hypercard stacks. Anything that's personal creativity is always fun to discover. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
danda Posted July 29, 2020 Report Share Posted July 29, 2020 On 7/27/2020 at 2:14 PM, Mu0n said: Would love it if you found ... hypercard stacks I am the maintainer of the HyperCard Online project, and over the past three years have got over 3,500 stacks running online in the browser (thanks to hosting and help from the Internet Archive). I've built an online uploader for anyone to add their own stacks to the collection - if you find any stacks, I'd love it if you uploaded them so I could add them to the collection. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Scott Baret Posted July 29, 2020 Report Share Posted July 29, 2020 Do any of these disks contain a program called Dinosaur Days? I've been looking for that one for 25 years!! Quote Link to post Share on other sites
indianboi3 Posted July 29, 2020 Report Share Posted July 29, 2020 That's a damn great find. Congrats man. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
TweedyF Posted July 30, 2020 Author Report Share Posted July 30, 2020 On 7/29/2020 at 4:16 AM, danda said: I've built an online uploader for anyone to add their own stacks to the collection - if you find any stacks, I'd love it if you uploaded them so I could add them to the collection. That’s amazing! Definitely will do. @Scott Baret I’ll keep an eye out for Dinosaur Days. So far nothing much out of the ordinary. It seems like these came from someone who did engineering or software work at GCC back in the day, so there are a lot of utilities and that kind of thing. On the plus side, I’d say better than nine in ten have no bad segments. Anyway I’ll keep plugging through them! Quote Link to post Share on other sites
68kMLA Supporter cheesestraws Posted July 30, 2020 68kMLA Supporter Report Share Posted July 30, 2020 Keep an eye out for rare dev tools as well, then! Some of those have apparently been lost to time... Quote Link to post Share on other sites
TweedyF Posted July 31, 2020 Author Report Share Posted July 31, 2020 Quick question - I'm imaging these using DiskDup+ then stuffing using Stuffit 5.5. Should I be using a different version of Stuffit? Would love if anyone knows offhand what the ideal version to use would be. As it is, I'm not familiar enough with all the compatibility issues to know, and since Stuffit is a pain as it is, I've just been using the version installed on the Mac with the floppy drive that I'm using to image the disks. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
TweedyF Posted July 31, 2020 Author Report Share Posted July 31, 2020 Also @Dog Cow I found a copy of TOPS -- let me know if you want to try it out! Quote Link to post Share on other sites
68kMLA Supporter cheesestraws Posted July 31, 2020 68kMLA Supporter Report Share Posted July 31, 2020 8 hours ago, TweedyF said: I found a copy of TOPS -- let me know if you want to try it out! Ooh, what version of TOPS? Quote Link to post Share on other sites
NJRoadfan Posted July 31, 2020 Report Share Posted July 31, 2020 If there is a "LaserWriter Installation Disk" dated 1985, that would be something to archive (driver would be earlier then 3.0). The original release of the LaserWriter driver seems "lost" for the moment. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
68kMLA Supporter Crutch Posted July 31, 2020 68kMLA Supporter Report Share Posted July 31, 2020 It looks like you MAY have Lightspeed C 2.0 or earlier there. To my knowledge that doesn’t exist on any archive and would be a Nice Find. (I see what look like two sets of original Lightspeed C disks: the ones with the red label are version 3, which is on the Garden. The set with the white label isn’t familiar to me and is, I’m hoping, an earlier version. If so, please upload it to an archive I don’t see disk 1 of that version however in the picture ...) Quote Link to post Share on other sites
LaPorta Posted July 31, 2020 Report Share Posted July 31, 2020 I believe I have TOPS...I have no idea what the heck it is, but I know I archived it from a floppy somewhere. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Byrd Posted July 31, 2020 Report Share Posted July 31, 2020 9 hours ago, LaPorta said: I believe I have TOPS...I have no idea what the heck it is, but I know I archived it from a floppy somewhere. I think .. it was some sort of early networking protocol software, between Macs and PCs? Quote Link to post Share on other sites
LaPorta Posted July 31, 2020 Report Share Posted July 31, 2020 Personally, for disks this old, I’d say StuffIt 1.5 max should be your goal. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Juror22 Posted July 31, 2020 Report Share Posted July 31, 2020 On 7/30/2020 at 6:31 AM, cheesestraws said: Keep an eye out for rare dev tools as well, then! Some of those have apparently been lost to time... Interested in ClearLake Research libraries and such. That's a terrific find - I've gotten a few similar caches, but mine have always turned out to be PC-based. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
68kMLA Supporter cheesestraws Posted August 1, 2020 68kMLA Supporter Report Share Posted August 1, 2020 14 hours ago, Byrd said: it was some sort of early networking protocol software, between Macs and PCs? Yeah, early file sharing, pre-AppleShare. Later versions were compatible with AFP too. Has DRM-related gubbins so you can't fire up two TOPS instances with the same serial number on the same network, hence interest in more copies of it. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
68kMLA Supporter Crutch Posted August 1, 2020 68kMLA Supporter Report Share Posted August 1, 2020 15 hours ago, Juror22 said: Interested in ClearLake Research libraries and such. That's a terrific find - I've gotten a few similar caches, but mine have always turned out to be PC-based. You mean ToolLib and MathLib for MS BASIC? Weren’t those bundled with later versions? I think I have them. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
68kMLA Supporter karrots Posted August 1, 2020 68kMLA Supporter Report Share Posted August 1, 2020 For any of the official disks it would be best to take a flux image using something like https://applesaucefdc.com/. Then you can copy any potential copy protect as well. Also has a better chance of recovering an aged floppy. You can export other image types after creating the flux image. In addition to any other site please upload to archive.org https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Rescuing_Floppy_Disks Quote Link to post Share on other sites
olePigeon Posted August 1, 2020 Report Share Posted August 1, 2020 TOPS was a file sharing platform that came out before AppleShare, but ran on AppleTalk (at least on the Macintosh version.) However, you could run any protocol you wanted over the serial or phonenet cables, so it was technically platform agnostic. They released LocalTalk cards for PCs to be used with DOS and UNIX. FlashTalk was released later on which was an extra fast version of AppleTalk. It used special AppleTalk adapters with separate clocks that enabled for high speed phone net transfers beyond what AppleTalk was capable of at the time. I used to have a few TOPS boxes for FlashTalk, but I never used them. Eventually gave them away. It was only marginally faster than traditional AppleTalk, and much slower than EtherNet. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
TweedyF Posted August 1, 2020 Author Report Share Posted August 1, 2020 (edited) @Crutch you're right on all counts. They're 400k MFS disks, but the main program disk seems to be missing. Until I get these up somewhere properly, here's the archive of disks 2 (Libraries) and 3 (Utilities), attached. @LaPorta good call – I'll stick with Stuffit 1.5.1. @cheesestraws I don't think any version of TOPS will install on my 128k (right?), and I can't get it to install on mini vMac, *and* the files don't have version numbers in the get info pane, so I don't actually know what version of TOPS it is. (The disks themselves are copies so there's no physical indication either.) Do you know any other way I can find out? LSC2,3.sit Edited August 1, 2020 by TweedyF Quote Link to post Share on other sites
68kMLA Supporter cheesestraws Posted August 1, 2020 68kMLA Supporter Report Share Posted August 1, 2020 Stick a disc image up here and someone can work it out I'm sure, possibly even me Quote Link to post Share on other sites
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