I need to get to some text files I put onto a floppy using slackware months ago, I went to a windows machine, booted a cd that came with the cd set it has the slackware 8.1 installation
on it, but I can not figure out how to access the text files on the cd.

Is it because they do not have .txt extension?
You should be able to open Notepad, Wordpad, Word, or whatever, browse to your CD and open the file (when using the show all files option, if needed).
I have noticed Wordpad displays readable files when Notepad does not.

If the disk is DOS formatted then it should be readable by a Windows machine like was stated in the prior post from Windows. If it is ext2 then use the following.

If you are booting a Slack CD and able to login. Then you need to mount the floppy disk first, prior to searching for any files. Try,

if disk is ext2 format then;
mount -t ext2 /dev/fd0 /mnt

if disk is DOS formatted then;
mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt

If it complains about the mount point /mnt does not exist then;
mkdir /mnt
and repeat the above.

You should then be able to "ls -l /mnt" and see the files and/or directories on the disk. Not sure about what you want to do with them though. So I am not able to help much from here. However, if the disk still remains unreadable then it is probably damaged or a bad floppy disk drive.