> still widely supported and easy to read using many tools, including open source ones One someone who has not tried could possibly say that. The numerous doc

> still widely supported and easy to read using many tools, including open source ones One someone who has not tried could possibly say that. The numerous doc file formats are a constant headache for anyone doing document processing. Not even Word itself can read its own older formats reliably. Sometimes you have better luck with LibreOffice, sometimes not. And that's the mostly widely used document file format. Anything else from the same era is completely dead in the water. Manually viewing them can be done in emulators with a bit of work but any automatic processing is a huge undertaking.