I bought a Yamaha CDR-1300-II in Dec 2004, so surprisingly only 20 years old! It's a great, unique piece of kit, and gave me hours of techie recording and editing pleasure back in the day. It's still wired into my system, but I don't think I've touched it for 3 or 4 years! Originally, I built-up a collection of my favourite tracks transferred to CD for playing in the car . . . but alas, CD players in cars are rare these days! I have now transferred some of the tracks from these CDs to my own stored play lists in Amazon Unlimited and stream from there. But you've now made me want to re-visit what's on that Yamaha HDD!
But, back to your question, John: the CDR-1300 has both optical and coaxial digital outputs so an excellent potential means to transfer out from the HDD (if you do not want to copy CD by CD one at a time). My PC has a digital soundcard (Creative Soundblaster @£35) which provides for excellent streamed output of my Amazon Unlimited HD subscription to my HiFi system; I have not used it for digital input (and hence recording). But, I guess in theory, we could output from the CDR-1300 to PC via opt/coax digital, and record to the PC's hard drive? Perhaps someone on here can advise on feasibility of this, or a work-a-round? I'd be very interested, too.