Kidnapper's retro computer offers scant clues

[Ilwrath]

Very odd ! I'm sure there are people here who could get the data without loss

Heh... True.  There is a LOT of old-school Commodore knowledge still out there.  

Of course, we don't know what the heck he might have done to that data to obscure it.  Essentially, the C= floppy drives were computers in and of themselves.  Make a custom EPROM for it (a 68764 or 2764 chip, IIRC) and the possibilities for data munging are quite extreme.

[Ilwrath]

Even if he had done something to the drive to make it encode the data in a different way so other drives won't be able to read it, they had his drive!

True...  Of course, you might have a few values you poke into the C64's memory to allow you to be able to USE that modified drive...  That would be a very unique take on password encryption!  :-)

The short of it is, we just don't know.  Of course, for ANY government organization to essentially come out and say they don't know how to use a certain type of computer simply because it is old......  That is remarkably disheartening.  They should have contract resources available for knowledge on any technology they may encounter.