Hello, world! Mom's old Packard Bell DOS computer from the '80s, powered on for the first time in almost twenty years, and possibly only the second time since Y2K (it seems to have survived just fine). Now to get dBase III running. 
Success! Here's a partial listing of artefacts from my mom's PhD research in archaeology.
(1/n) Follow-up! You may have noticed a bunch of 5.25" floppy disks in the previous photos. Question is: how do you get them onto a more modern storage medium when the DOS computer doesn't have a 3.5" floppy drive?
Answer:
Answer:
Now, to explain what's going on here: that's the DOS computer on the left and an old Windows XP tower on the right. The XP tower has a 3.5" drive, but the DOS tower doesn't have a smaller power cable for it. Just the big Molex ones. And I don't have an adapter. (2/n)
So I unplugged the 5.25" floppy drive from the DOS motherboard and plugged in the 3.5" drive, but the 3.5" drive is still plugged into the XP tower for power. This is rather silly and I don't recommend it to anyone. (3/n)
Now, another wrinkle! The DOS computer runs DOS 3.21, which, according to winworldpc.com/product/ms-dos… (yes, I did my research), is one release shy of the version that supports 1.44 MB floppies. So we need to reformat the blank floppies to 720 KB. (4/n)
We have a USB floppy drive, and I tried using the Windows 10 command prompt to reformat to 720 KB, but this doesn't seem to be supported. Luckily, we still have a Windows 95 computer that's more than up to the task: (5/n)
And don't forget to cover one of the holes with tape before reformatting: instructables.com/id/Convert-a-1… (6/n)
So, long story short: (a) Mom copied the files from the 5.25" disks to the DOS PC's hard drive, and now I'm copying them to 720 KB 3.5" disks, then (b) copying these to the Win95 PC's hard drive, and then to 1.44 MB disks. (7/n)
Final step is using the USB floppy drive to copy these to a flash drive in Windows 10. (8/n)
You may be wondering: why not try to install both floppy drives into the same computer? (E.g., the Windows XP computer, which also has a USB port.) That would require one of these cables, with both sets of floppy connectors: amazon.com/CablesOnline-U… (9/n)
Basically, I'm MacGyver-ing all of this as I go along, based solely on the parts we've got on hand. It was a matter of opening up both towers the other day and improvising. Learning a ton in the process. (10/10)
I also considered putting the 5.25" floppy drive in the XP computer (removing the CD drive first) and copying everything to USB directly. But I nuked the XP install a while ago (could reinstall, or install Ubuntu), and there are probably other things on the DOS HD to save (11/10)
Okay, another follow-up as I head back to Toronto: here's the .dbf file we opened in dBase III back in September (see photo above) -- but opened in @ArcGISPro! Unfortunately there aren't lat/lon fields, but it's still cool that the file from the 5.25" disk survived. (12/10)
I also discovered afterwards that the USB 3.5" floppy drive in Win10 could actually read/write 740 KB disks after all -- so I didn't need to re-copy the files to 1.44 MB disks with our Win95 PC. Still needed that PC to reformat the floppies to 740K in the first place. (13/10)
Attn @mgregotski
Stay tuned for next Christmas, when I try to recover text from the 3.5" floppies used by my Dad's old Panasonic word processor! (14/14)
