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

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!

Check back in a few minutes im going to run a few tests on this txt file.

I am assuming we are working with englis/us/ascii characters right?

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/7fea18/

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.

Thanks again. Ben

Great response time John and that anonymous sure sounds like he knows his WheelWriters!

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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

JohnBlaZe