USB floppy drive to read old MacPlus disks

[ncudmore]

Folks,

I've been clearing out my loft, and found my old Macintosh Plus, keyboad, mouse and software from my student days. If still powers up and works!

Anyway, I also found a disk box of some 24 * 3.5" 800k floppies of my old work, dissertation, and things, and would really like to get these onto a current machine as well as Mac Project and MacWrite, MacPaint etc. to read them.

I've an old 12" G4 Powerbook which I rebuilt with 10.4.11 so it runs Classic, but I now need someway of getting the files off the 3.5" floppies. The Mac+ has no ethernet only the old Appletalk. I tried my local Mac Store who wanted to sell me a nice new USB floppy drive which was PC compatible. Now I know the old SuperDrives could read these old 800Kb disks but will a modern drive read them as well? The Mac Expert in store didn't have a clue, and to be frank it didn't look like he was even born when these were around.

So, can anyone tell me if this will work or any other suggestions on transferring these files?

 

[icemanjc]

To my knowledge any USB floppy drive should read them as I have a used two different USB floppy drives (one that came with an imac and a PC one) to transfer files from 800k disks.

As for running these files there are a couple programs that will let you run old system software if you are not able to run them in classic. The one program I know of is Mini Vmac which will run in OS X and emulate almost any system up to OS 9. You'll have to do some searching for the ROM and software. However, if you need it and want to wait a little while, I have it sitting around at home and I can put it up in time.