Imaging My IIgs Personal Data Disks

This evening I took the time to archive all my old Apple IIgs floppies. This is something I have been meaning to do since I got my CFFA3000 card. I have been pretty lucky in that, having been told since the early nineties that floppy discs will just disintegrate over time, all of my disks are in good shape and I have never had one fail on me. But I know it will eventually happen, and probably soon. Ripping floppies to disc images on the CFFA is a piece of cake. Each of these discs took about 3 minutes to pull down onto a thumb drive as a .PO disk image. The most difficult part of the process was scanning the actual disks into photoshop so that I could have a nice digital record of my horrible teenage handwriting (seen above). The best labels are the ones where I crossed out the name of some old pirated game and reused the disk for my files. You’d think there would be a nice application on the IIgs for printing disk labels?

For as much as I loved my old Apple IIgs (and the Apple ][+ before that), I didn’t really have that much personal data to save. I guess I wasn’t using the raw computing power of the Apple II for productivity and content creation and was more focused on gaming. What I do have is a bunch of college term papers and essays that are filled with the grammatical atrocities you’ve come to expect on this Web site. There is also a fair share of musical compositions that my brother and I churned out in Music Studio. Classics like “Robert is Coll” (sic) and “Ultra Coolness.” Yeah, I was really concerned about my cool factor in those days (but too lazy to fix my coll typo). Finally, there are a few discs of drawings and images that we created in Deluxepaint and PaintWorks Gold. I may post some of those in the near future. They are quite.. ahem… cool.