Technology

Yeah, as others have said, floppies without cases.

Just to be clear, floppy cases were never meant to be removed. They were glued together in such a way that it wasn't possible to take the case off without breaking the case. And these disks can't be read without the cases. Basically, the cases were considered part of the disk (just like the plastic casing of a an audio cassette or VHS is integral to the functioning of the medium.) I have to imagine whoever took these out of their cases had a misunderstanding about how computers on the order of thinking a CD-ROM tray is a drink holder or trying to print a document by laying the monitor face-down on the bed of a copy machine.

If you wanted to read the 3.5" disks, you might be able to do so if you can procure a proper floppy drive and some sacrificial floppy disks. It'd probably take some finesse and careful gluing skills.

But that all assumes that these disks haven't lost their data already. Floppies tend to just plain old degrade over time. So the data very is very likely heavily corrupted.

I have heard of really specialized hardware to read data off of degraded disks, but that's probably "you have to know a guy/gal" level of specialization. If you really wanted to go that route, I think you'd probably want to know if what you have there is "valuable" (basically not already available on Archive.org and also interesting like unreleased source code or something.) But if you thought you had something like that and wanted to pursue it, you could @ Jason Scott (@[email protected]) on Mastodon. If anybody has a lead on how to read those, it's him.