On Sun, 19 Oct 2025, Wayne S via cctalk wrote:
It’s more about being able to read and understand the
contents of the
disk. The first line saying they will only use floppies with a Shucart
interface shows the (low) level of knowledge of floppy drives and disks.
Large amounts, or at least a large portion, of the specific KIND of
information that they are after will be found on Apple and Mac disks.
Apple Turnover was one of many hardware adaptations, to be able to read
AppleII with Shugart interface.
A good flux transition device, even with Shugrart interface, would let
them get at the raw track content, and then we find out whether they are
any good at analyzing them.
Do they have knowledge of the (low) level formats of disks?
Do they have knowledge of the higher lever (such as DIRectory structures of disks?
Do they have knowledge of the file formats (often proprietary) used by programs?
I have been told that each version of Weird and WordPervert can handle
files form or two versions back; but older than that is not supported.
First time that I was a Wordstar file, what neede to be done was
immediately obvious.
But almost everything newer gets difficult.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com