Hello,
I’ve got a 80s throwback question for you.
A paralegal in our office has an IBM Wheelwriter 50 Series II (6788) that she uses for all her wordprocessing. It’s from 1988. It has a little computer monitor attached to it that accepts 3.5″ floppies. I’m trying to help her move to a PC, but she doesn’t want to lose all the documents she has stored on these floppies. I’ve tried reading the floppies with MS Word and Wordperfect on a PC, but it comes up as nonsense. Any idea on a utility/process to move the documents over to a PC-readable format?Thanks for your help.
Here is the answer: I believe that IBM used EBCDIC coding, which explains the nonsense characters. It may be possible to save documents as ASCII, but I guess you’d have to open each one first.Or there’s this…
Ooh, EBCDIC, good point. Here’s an online EBCDIC-ASCII converter that you could run a couple files through, to see if Mutant Enemy’s suggested app would be useful.
On a unix-like system (including Mac):dd if=file.txt of=newfile.txt conv=asciiConverts the file from EBCDIC and reveals readable text… there’s still a bunch of crap in there, but it’s half the battle.
Oh, and I confirmed that the EBCDIC – ASCII conversion worked, with a sample file provided by the OP in other online forums where (s)he has posed the same question.
Wow. I’ll give this conversion a try. Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll let you know how it goes.posted by banger100 at 7:04 AM on July 13
You folks are golden. The EBCDIC-ASCII conversion tool worked! The resulting file has all the text, but also a lot of nonsense that I’ll need to strip out. Any easy way to strip out all the remaining nonsense?posted by banger100 at 7:17 AM on July 13
Note that there are several different versions of EBCDIC, most of the online converters are going to be geared towards the System/360 variant I’d imagine. So you might want to try the files on a few different translators if you don’t have immediate success.posted by Mitheral at 7:26 AM on July 13
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Can you upload a sample file on one of the file sharing networks? Or give us a link to check it out?
JohnBlaZe
I love a challenge Try downloading OmniFlop and using it.
Most floppy WP machines were either DOS compatible filesystems or
close enough to be able to read the files one way or another on a PC.
What you cant read in most cases is the formatting commands. They’ll
be there but are usually not compatible with any standard PC WP
format. So you can get the text content off, but the embedded
formatting commands generally end up lost.
Putting the flop in a PC will usually enable reading all the files. If
lucky they’ll read right. If semi-lucky you’ll end up with bits of
files tacked onto other files. If unlucky you’ll need to copy the
floppy .iso image and work from that. Always keep each floppyful in
its own separate folder, as some files may have bits missing and
attached to other files.
Once youve got your disc contents onto PC, ‘Canopener’ will strip what
you’ve got of the junk, leaving just the text content. It often takes
2 or 3 goes to get the filter settings right.
AbottSystems
I’ll give some of these options a try. If I can’t get it to work I’ll post a sample file.
Thanks for your help. You guys are golden.
Good Luck Ben and Let us know how it turns out…
Great response time John and that anonymous sure sounds like he knows his WheelWriters!
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A little follow up.
To horsec9: The only machine we have in the office with a disk drive is a win95 machine (yikes). So I had to download OmniDisk instead of OmniFlop. Lots of DOS commands to sort through and I’m not sure how to run it.
To anonymous: On at least one of the disks I can see the files as .txt files. Will canopener help me filter out the garbage? Canopener is $40, which I don’t want to have to spend unless I have to.
Thanks again. Ben
win95 hmmm youcan buy usb floppy for xp or you can take floppy drive out of 95 machine and put in xp or better machine.
i look at Canopener and it looks like it should work if u cn see files. It also has money back for 30 days. i would email and ask if it does not work can you get refund
omniflop is free i would mess with that 1st if u need help let us know.
Link us to an image of one of the floppies Ben and I’ll check it out.
Hopefully I was able to image it correctly.
http://www.filefactory.com/file/7fea18/
i downloaded the image but could not open it using http://www.towodo.com/ which is what it looks like you used to image it.
How about just a rar or zip of the files … even just one of the files will do as well.
http://www.filefactory.com/file/8666ff/
I just threw one file in there.
I got that one. This file looks like it is all formating code. Are there other files that are txt? If so can you open them up and see if you see any normal text in them?
I am assuming we are working with englis/us/ascii characters right?
No, all the files open up with garbage like that.
Yes, we’re working in English/ASCII.
Let me give something a shot – i would see if you can get a response from canopener if they still honor their 30 day money back guarantee and if they think it will work.
Check back in a few minutes im going to run a few tests on this txt file.
Hmm I could not get anything out of the file. According to the docs it says i should see normal text seperated by garbage text. That should be the markup.
But I dont see anything. There are some compaines that do this type of recovery one I found is pivar.com . I tried calling them but I just sat on hold.
Try emailing em’ let us know how it goes!
Thanks for trying Karl. I’ll try Canopener first I think and then some other companies.
Looks like here is the solution within this thread will post it to the original question now for others.
I believe that IBM used EBCDIC coding, which explains the nonsense characters. It may be possible to save documents as ASCII, but I guess you’d have to open each one first.
Or there’s this…
posted by No Mutant Enemy at 6:17 AM on July 13
Ooh, EBCDIC, good point. Here’s an online EBCDIC-ASCII converter that you could run a couple files through, to see if Mutant Enemy’s suggested app would be useful.
posted by rkent at 6:39 AM on July 13
On a unix-like system (including Mac):
dd if=file.txt of=newfile.txt conv=ascii
Converts the file from EBCDIC and reveals readable text… there’s still a bunch of crap in there, but it’s half the battle.
posted by buxtonbluecat at 6:44 AM on July 13
Oh, and I confirmed that the EBCDIC – ASCII conversion worked, with a sample file provided by the OP in other online forums where (s)he has posed the same question.
posted by buxtonbluecat at 6:47 AM on July 13
Wow. I’ll give this conversion a try. Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll let you know how it goes.
posted by banger100 at 7:04 AM on July 13
You folks are golden. The EBCDIC-ASCII conversion tool worked! The resulting file has all the text, but also a lot of nonsense that I’ll need to strip out. Any easy way to strip out all the remaining nonsense?
posted by banger100 at 7:17 AM on July 13
Note that there are several different versions of EBCDIC, most of the online converters are going to be geared towards the System/360 variant I’d imagine. So you might want to try the files on a few different translators if you don’t have immediate success.
posted by Mitheral at 7:26 AM on July 13
So it looks like Ben got his answer all be it not from us but his solution is posted above now.
thanks i have a bunch of these with old journals on them and this should help me fish them out.