Thanks jhieminga, I appreciate your time. I want to try all this now instead of doing the plumbing, but needs must !
I will try booting from the floppys.
I also have a more modern, (but old) HP Windows machine, running Windows 10. If the floppys fail, by putting the old HDD in a USB caddy; can I just ask the HP to find and retrieve files by file name, say, "3xxlims.pub" or "abcdefgh.doc" or is it more complex than that?