Recovery of backed up Clarisworks docs for use on an iMac?

[Carrier]

I need to recover past correspondence that was on another computer and will appreciate some advice on how to do it. We used to have a Power Mac 6100/66. Our word processing was done on Clarisworks 3.0. All documents were saved in Clarisworks format. We regularly backed up the documents on to ten floppies using the back up facility of Norton Utilities for Macintosh. We disposed of the 6100/66 but still have the floppies with the saved documents. I have a USB floppy drive that came with a Toshiba laptop.

We recently bought an iMac and would like to access some of the documents from the floppies. How do we do this? I have a copy of Clarisworks 4.0 which should be able to open and read the documents once they are on our new iMac. I also have a copy of NUM 3.5 with which I hoped to be able to recover the documents from the floppy and move them on to the iMac. However, when I inserted the CD I was advised that Classic is not supported by the iMac. It seems there is no backwards compatibility with older software. We have iWork on the iMac but I wonder if this also has no backwards compatibility and will not open Clarisworks documents.

How may I recover the backed up documents from the floppies and have them available for use on the iMac?

[Louis]

Hmm, I am no Mac expert by any means, but your recent iMac runs an Intel processor, which has no support for the older Mac OS versions. Later, now discontinued, versions of Symantec Utilities ran on Mac OS 10.3 Panther (which supports Intel Macs), and are not garanteed to be compatible with Tiger or Leopard.

Otherwise, find an older PowerPC-based G3 or G4 and you might be able to run your copy of Norton Utilities Mac on it.

iWork opens AppleWorks documents, so my guess is that it should manage your older ClarisWorks files. Did you try running ClarisWorks 4 at all? (I think it should run under Rosetta...)

Good luck,

Louis