

Mac OS X could read floppies but would try to format them as HFS not HFS Plus, up to 10.5. HFS as created in 1985 for System 2.1 but support was dropped to write to volumes in 10.6 and read from volumes in 10.15.Thus a floppy can’t be formatted and read by a modern-ish computer. Macintosh File System was introduced for early Macs and supported throughout Macintosh System 7 as a read-only volume, but stopped working in Macintosh System 8.The ports for the floppy drives themselves can be adapted to work on later models, including the Mac. Those computers didn’t have hard drives as we think of them today (they mostly used the old Shugart floppy enclosures – which later kinda’ evolved into Seagate after Al’s shenanigans selling the company with his name and needing to pick a new name). That part is useful for getting files to go from Apple II and Apple III to a classic Macintosh operating system via sneaker net. Apple II and Apple III: Classic Macs could read ProDOS volumes.

Let’s start with the file system on disks: I recently had two or three different projects that involved taking files from classic Apple computers and getting them up to modern Apple hardware notably to my MacBook that runs Ventura.
