I’m currently in the process of pulling some old files – these date from 1994 – off of our very much unused Macintosh Classic.

The only way I really have to do this is to use a floppy disk. I’m lucky I still have one to use – that, and I have this nifty USB floppy drive.

What amazes me is that the files transfer right over to the modern-day Macintosh – labels, icons, resource forks, everything. Yay for backwards compatibility. We’ve even managed to get Pam’s original college thesis files to open up in Word after a little fiddling with the format.

It will take a while to do this at 1.44MB per transfer, but it is working. Mind you, it isn’t a lot of data – the entire system is 85MB in size. Yes, it could fit on a thumb drive many, many times over.

I pretty much have to – the disk in the Ye Olde Macintosh is failing and will soon be unable to boot. Better get it now or forget about it. Once that is done I will prepare some new operating system disks, change out the hard drive and reload it. After that… who knows? I may keep it, I may send it to a loving home.

For a trip down memory lane, here are the specs for the Macintosh Classic.