It's like Apple is a different company than it was when it produced the computer I'm talking about, so I'm not sure this is the intended topic of discussion here, but this is a question about Apple hardware, so here I go.
I have an old Franklin Ace 2100 Apple-compatible computer that I'm about to send off to a museum, but I also have a bunch of homemade software that they're not interested in and can't help me recover. Before I send this off I'd like to know that someday I might be able to get at that software again myself. I thought I once saw 5.25" USB floppy drives on Thinkgeek that might have been useful in such a data recovery process, but I can't find them any more. And even if I did, I know Apple 5.25" drives are incompatible with IBM/PC drives possibly at a hardware level, so I don't know if it would have been useful.
Can anyone help me figure out if there's a cost effective device for extracting the data from these old Apple ][ disks from the 1980s (they're almost all still functional – I just tried them yesterday again!)? I could elect to rely on a data recovery service, but then I would have to hold on to my system long enough to sort out what disks I want to recover data from before I send it away, so ideally, I'd like to be able to perform this recovery myself. My current system, BTW, is not from Apple (it's a "PC", and not an Apple-based one — the term "PC" has always bothered me — Apples were personal computers too).
Best Answer
Lots of work has been done in the retrocomputing community to allow transfer of 5 1/4" floppies in all the major 8-bit formats to virtual disk images that can be used on a modern computer via emulation software. For example, KryoFlux is a hardware interface that uses generic (cheap) PC-style floppy drives to read any disk format, including Apple II. This is kind of overkill for doing what you want, but how valuable are your old BASIC programs to you? Memories are priceless...