first, back up. then try to rename *.txt
basically, people are talking about recovering old files that have text information on them. they are not floppies with spreadsheet data, programs, etc. they are files of written material.
First, back up all old floppies!
If you are not good at this, get someone to help you. Get a comp that still has DOS and do "xcopy."
If you look around, you can still find the 5.25 inch floppies, and the 5.25 drives. They are easy to install for someone that is familiar with installing a computer component of any kind.
recovery:
often, these older machines used the basic ascii text editor. if so, and if you renamed any of these files in the 8.3 format, with the extension ".txt", they should open up in a current word processor: MS Word, MS Notepad, MS Wordpad, Corel Wordperfect, etc.
Just whatever the name is, remname it like this: shorten it to 8 letters, then put .txt right after the name. Like: turn thejoyofspring into joysprin.txt
It may not be perfect because there might be some extra formatting info that would be displayed as characters (that would look like nonsense writing), and there might be some formatting that would be lost, i.e., titles that were underlined are not underlined anymore. No big deal, as long as you have the entire text.
Many older word processor programs and typewriters were simply glorified ascii editors. They still are. That is why you can cut and paste from MS Word into some blank on an internet order form - they use the same language to code for each of the 26 letters.
often, because these typewriters-with-memory-and-floppies were systems to be used for one thing and one thing only, you did not have to give "extensions" to file names. They did not have to be able to tell a text file from a program file from a music file.
Word Perfect 5.0 was a DOS-based word processor that was very big for years. It did not ask you to give file extensions to file names. But if you renamed them whatever.txt, you could get them to open up in a Windows 3.1 or Windows 95-based word processor program like MS Word.