Really Old (tm) floppies...

[Ronny Svedman <rosv4119@student.uu.se>]

I am digging through the storeroom at our local Uni Computerclub here in
Uppsala, Sweden. We have a few AppleII's, and a *lot* of old floppies with
various stuff on them..


almost all of these floppies are strangely enough perfectly readable and
unseable, so i am in the process of making images (dsk) of them for
backing eveything up. My concern is this:

These Very Old Floppies (VOF for short) seem to be oxidized or something
similar, since the media surface is not at all shiny like new floppies,
but rather dull brown and non-reflecting. some of them are unevenly
stained on the media (i.e on the disk itself), like they have been exposed
to moisture (not at all unlikely; they have been in a basement storage for
years).

As i said, Most of these floppies, though optically seeming pretty
damaged, work perfectly fine. Do you think there is any problems re-using
them, with regard to this oxidized layer on them, or should i just read
them once to make backup images and then junk them? I don't like theidea
of throwing away approx. 200 floppies, but i dont like the idea of
wearing down the Disk][ drive heads either..

So far, i have cleaned the driveheads with a cloth & alcohol every 5-or-so
hours of continuous disk use while ADT-ing images to a pc. (i kept the
drive "cabbed down"..) I realise this must be putting an unusual load on
the powersupply (non-enhanced IIe Pal version (220v supply)) so i have
rigged a couple of big fans (from a pdp11 i think, or possibly from a LMI
lisp machine(cadr)) that i found in the storeroom to blow into the open
lid of the apple to cool things off (i actually had the powersupply cut
out on me once). As soon as i can lay my hands on another SSC, i'll hook
up an Apple II+ as well, to do two images at once :-) 

By the way: 

I discovered that we have two Z80-cards (microsoft softcard & another one) 
and apple CP/M. Is "general" cp/m software portable to the Apple when
using these cards (i.e wordstar and such), or was there always special
apple cp/m editions of cp/m applications? Ofcourse listed microsoft Basic
programs should be portable, but what about "heavier" applications? 



I apologise for being verbose and possibly unclear, but i'd appreciate any
input regarding these matters =) 


Yours

Ronny Svedman
Update Computer Society
Uppsala University
Sweden


PS: note that this is my home email address, not my @update address. 
please reply to ronnyATupdateDOTuuPERIODse , since that is where i am when
i'm playing around with the apples :-)