They make USB floppy drives. Who knew? I bought the Chuanganzhuo 3.5″ USB External Floppy Disk Drive from amazon and it did the job. I can get Raman spectra off the old instrument and into my laptop without a huge process involving another PC from 2001 and a second form of removable media. So that’s nice. And I got a spectrum of ethanol. So that’s progress, too:

Now that I have reference spectra, I can start building an instrument. This guy knows what’s up. Building optical instruments is fun.