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Original WWW proposal is a Word for Macintosh 4 file from 1990, can we open it?
- j45 3y agohttps://www.ebay.com/itm/235033043066 https://www.ebay.com/itm/235033043066 The original word for macOS software seems more than available.
- zdw 3y agoIf you wanted exactly what would have been printed, on the emulator running Word for Mac 4.0 you should be able to install a print queue that can generate a .ps (Postscript) file, which would could be converted to PDF. Or Acrobat may be available for that old of an OS and would have a virtual print driver to go directly to PDF.
- detourdog 3y agoI know I have running Macs with Word 5.1a which I consider the last Word version needed. I'm sure I opened Word 4.0 files.
- kps 3y agoYes, a few years ago I helped a friend recover a bunch of old documents. The solution was to use Mac Word 5 to open the Word 4 files and save them as something newer versions could read.
- jgrahamc 3y agoAh. Great suggestion! I just used Print2PDF to make a PDF from Word. Will update the blog.
- chrisfinazzo 3y agohttps://web.mit.edu/ghostscript/www/Ps2pdf.htm https://web.mit.edu/ghostscript/www/Ps2pdf.htm Or, if you prefer to do more tweaking yourself, dive into the Ghostscript deep end :) https://www.ghostscript.com https://www.ghostscript.com
- msephton 3y agoLibreOffice opens it right up. It's support for old document file formats is really excellent. I keep it around for just this purpose. https://imgur.com/a/JENgq6V https://imgur.com/a/JENgq6V But I also love using BasiliskII and InfiniteMac emulators!
- graemep 3y agoLibreOffice was the first thing I tried, and it worked with no problem.
- jgrahamc 3y agoWell, except for all the problems I outlined in the post.
- soperj 3y agoheadline says "open" and libreoffice opened it with no problem.
- TaylorAlexander 3y agoI simply opened the file with my hex editor. Problem solved. (sarcasm)
- jgrahamc 3y agoI actually opened it in emacs in hexl-mode before I ran the file command!
- skissane 3y agoIn the past, I have in all seriousness read Microsoft Word documents on Linux using less. I might have had LibreOffice installed, but it can’t run over SSH. It works okay with most old school (pre-XML) ones, since the document text is in the file in plain ASCII amidst all the binary formatting stuff. For the new XML formats, less by itself doesn’t do anything useful, but unzip them and you can read the XML containing the document text.
- arnaudsm 3y agoGreat cautionary tale about how quickly formats get obsolete, especially closed source ones. I use markdown, plaintext and png for all the documents I need to store long term. Even if these formats disappear, I could trivially reimplement my own parser.
- ComputerGuru 3y agoIsn’t markdown plaintext? (I didn’t downvote.)
- williamcotton 3y agoIsn’t HTML plaintext? ;)
- ComputerGuru 3y agoYes, but not intended to be directly human readable by contrast.
- Narishma 3y agoIf it wasn't intended to be human readable it would have been a binary format.
- robinsonb5 3y agoIt may have been intended to be human readable, but it failed dismally in that goal. Even before the web turned into the javascript infested swamp that is now, the tags having the same visual weight as the text they enclose made it tiring to read. Markdown's genius is in the formatting tags being almost no hindrance to readability.
- williamcotton 3y agoI definitely agree that Markdown is more readable than markup, but personally I abhor what some frameworks do to HTML. I make sure my HTML is legible! There is even a benefit when it comes to hyperlinks in that you can see the URL!
- dzdt 3y agoSomehow the author doesnt recognize that emulation is a legitimate answer to this question. Yes he was able to open the document, by using the original software on a highly accurate emulation of the original system. Everything beyond that point is a different question: can we get it inside of a modern word processor.
- jgrahamc 3y agoSort of. What I wanted was to be able to get a PDF version of it. I was hoping that a modern word processor would read the file format, and LibreOffice did. But it's also true that using emulation I was able to get a PDF (albeit one that has different fonts).
- nextaccountic 3y ago> it's also true that using emulation I was able to get a PDF (albeit one that has different fonts). Maybe you needed to have the right fonts installed in your emulated mac? Another comment in this thread pointed out this
- londons_explore 3y agoEmulation is starting to get gaps too... for example, running Windows 95 in an emulator on a modern machine is getting harder and harder (emulators like vmware and virtualbox don't emulate the CPU speed accurately, which causes the system not to boot, and they also don't emulate various paging behaviours of old intel CPU's accurately which causes windows applications to crash within a few seconds of starting). There are binary patches to windows 95 to fix these issues, but as the system gets older it's less likely people will put effort into binary patching it for compatibility with modern systems. And if it were more obscure, you'd be SOL.
- fourfour3 3y agoWhole system emulation like 86box does a much better job of emulating older hardware and OSes - I use it quite a bit for DOS/Win3.11/Win9x era stuff.
- markus92 3y agoAs a testament to Microsoft's backwards compatibility: the file opened mostly fine in the Windows version of Word (version 2401), and the layout seems to be identical to the PDF of the article. It did block the file format by default but that was easy enough to allow. The graphics did not open however, due to a missing graphics filter for the Microsoft Word Picture format. Seem it's been deprecated for a while now but Word 2003 should be able to open it? Which is old, but not that old not to run on modern systems.
- markus92 3y agoInstalled a copy of Word 2003, document opened flawlessly immediately with default settings. Saving it from there converted it to a modern .doc which I could open with Office 365 and convert to PDF etc. I think the moral of the story is that the Windows Office team seems to spend a bit more time on backwards compatibility.
- jgrahamc 3y agoI would be interested to see a PDF generated from Office 365 to understand how flawless it really is.
- zokier 3y agoHere you go, exported from desktop Word to PDF. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lnaSr22l3kQbmFHnxg3Ggd3-46vQdems/view?usp=drivesdk https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lnaSr22l3kQbmFHnxg3Ggd3-46v... Full version string: Microsoft® Word for Microsoft 365 MSO (Version 2311 Build 16.0.17029.20140) 64-bit
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- crazygringo 3y agoI'm surprised he didn't try an intermediate version of Word -- not the original Word 4.0 for Mac, but not the current online version of Word either. I had a lot of old Word 4.0 for Mac files at one point, and remember some point in the late 1990's or early 2000's opening them all up in a version of Word for Windows, and then re-saving them in a more up-to-date Word format. I believe there was an official converter tool Microsoft provided as a free add-on or an optional install component -- it wouldn't open the "ancient" Word formats otherwise. There's definitely going to be a chain here of 1 or 2 intermediate versions of Word that should be able to open the document perfectly and get it into a modern Word format, I should think -- and I'm curious what the exact versions are. (Although as other people point out, if you don't need to edit it, then exporting it as PostScript in Word 4.0 and converting it to PDF works fine too.)
- jasomill 3y agoAs I've discovered while playing with this document and reading this thread: Current Word for Mac blocks opening the file under discussion, with no obvious workarounds. Current Word for Windows will only open the file with non-default security settings, and won't render the images at all. Per Microsoft, PICT image support was removed from all versions of Word for Windows in August 2019[1]. The current version of Word for Mac fails to render the images with a misleading error message ("There is not enough memory or disk space to display or print the picture."). As for fonts, they should render fine assuming you have matching fonts, where "matching" is defined by some application- or OS-specific algorithm, e.g., a post above indicates LibreOffice (on Linux?) substituting Times New Roman for Palatino when Palatino Linotype was avilable, whereas current Word on Windows 11 has no problem rendering Palatino as Palatino, presumably using the copy of Palatino Linotype installed with the OS. Finally, if matching spacing (character, word, and line), line breaks, and page breaks is important, you should definitely open the document using as close a version of Word as possible with the exact fonts used when creating the document installed. Oh, and hope the original author didn't rely on printer fonts without matching scalable screen fonts available, or else you're probably SOL unless your goal is printing to a sufficiently similar printer. [1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/support-for-pict-images-is-being-turned-off-in-office-for-windows-e2c35537-f029-4f10-8650-211b388e20e8 https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/support-for-pict-...
- elzbardico 3y agoI am deeply disappointed that a company like Microsoft doesn't make a point of Microsoft Word being able to open any document created by any version of Word, no matter how ancient it is. I think they have the social/historical/economical responsibility of doing so. If they are worried about vulnerabilities in the old parsing code, move it to an external process, run it under isolation in a sandbox to spit out a newer readable version on the fly, but don't eliminate this capability from the software. EDIT: zokier pointed out to me that the desktop version of Word opens the file fine, it is only the web version that doesn't. So, consider this post void. EDIT 2: Well it opens the document, but is not able to display or print the embedded graphics, it seems.
- OJFord 3y agoYou don't have to go anywhere near 1990 to find issues with modern Microsoft (especially cloud) apps opening documents created in older ones!
- kiwijamo 3y agoIndeed. If I ever end up in the cloud version of Word (or indeed any other app) my first instinct is to click 'Open in App'.
- zokier 3y agoYou missed the fact that the real Word does open this file just fine, its just the toy web version that has issues (and maybe Mac too but eh)
- elzbardico 3y agoOh, really? I stand corrected. Thanks for pointing this out.
- jgrahamc 3y agoNo, you're not wrong, another commenter points out that latest Word opens the document but doesn't display the graphics.
- rietta 3y agoExtremely interesting and thank you for doing this. I feel strongly that this goes to show just how important preserving historical software and emulation is. I have dabbled myself with old Windows 3.1 software for this very reason. We really, truly are going to have a period where web application driven software just disappears and we wont easily have this retro computing view of these decades in a short time from now.
- dfxm12 3y agoI also think it is important to show the importance of open formats or open source in general if we want future generations to read our documents or run/compile/understand our software.
- CharlesW 3y ago[silly pre-coffee post deleted]
- jgrahamc 3y agoWord is already available on the Infinite Mac as it's under Productivity inside the Infinite HD. No need to install it.
- whoopdedo 3y ago> That way I can see actual fonts, font sizes and layout to confirm how the document should have looked. Or you would if you had the original fonts. Word 4.0 was released for System 6 with support as far back as System 3.2. Fonts at that time had separate screen and printer files for the different output resolutions. If you're missing the printer font it'll print a scaled (using nearest-neighbor) rendering of the screen font. If you're missing the screen font it'll substitute the system font. (Geneva by default, as seen in the screenshot.) In this case, only the well-known Palatino and Courier typefaces are needed. But LibreOffice substituted Times New Roman even though I have Palatino Linotype installed.
- jgrahamc 3y agoThat may go some way to explaining some of the differences I see, but the main thing I was looking for in the emulation was the font sizes.
- jasomill 3y agoThis is probably because the (internal) name of Palatino Linotype is "PalatinoLinotype" (for the version shipped with Windows) or "PalatinoLTStd" (for the Adobe OpenType version). In the absence of a hard-coded special case, font matching based on common prefixes could easily match something inappropriate, such as — taking the first example I see on my machine — mapping "Lucida" to "LucidaConsole", when almost any proportional sans-serif font would arguably be a better match for the document author's design intent. Then again, even exact name matches provide no guarantees. For example, Apple has shipped two fonts (internally) named NewYork: the TrueType conversion of Susan Kare's 1983 bitmap design for the original Macintosh, and an unrelated design released in 2019.
- stuaxo 3y agoThis is good. It would be good to get some feature requests into libreoffice to fix the remaining mis-matches in the formatting.
- scaglio 3y agoThis rises a potential problem, often underrated by companies: some have backups with infinite retention. It is common to have backups with retention of 10 years, some may have 20 years for legal reasons… but the majority of people don't understand the difference between "readable" and "usable". Of course, it depends on the data… And there are companies backing up whole virtual machines with infinite retention, believing to be able to run them: it is hard enough to restore a vSphere 5.x machine on a brand new vSphere 8, I really don't understand this waste of space.
- actionfromafar 3y agoOften an old file or disk image is tiny compared to modern file sizes. So the waste of space is more of an administrative character than a waste of disk space.
- rvnx 3y agoIf you backup all, you can sort later, and even eventually never. It costs 1 USD per month at Google Cloud to store 1TB of data. At this price it's not worth sorting, when one single devops costs 100 USD+ per hour, not including the opportunity cost of not working on something more productive (and less boring for the developer). Then X years after the company is acquired, or sufficient time has lapsed, you can delete / drop the data without sorting. Regarding virtual machines, if it's VMDK for example, you can read the raw disks without booting it, and again, it's not worth taking a risk to lose data to potentially save 10 USD per month, which is similar to one developer taking one beer extra at a team event.
- scaglio 3y ago> if it's VMDK for example, you can read the raw disks without booting it Yes, but that's the difference between "readable" and "usable". Many companies don't realize the technical difficulties to be able to run the VMs. They just expect that it will work, if needed.
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoWordPerfect claims the ability to open MS Word 4.0 files. The standard edition is currently $175. I'm not buying it, but if you're willing to spend $175 it might be something to try.
- caboteria 3y agoYet another example of why Apache needs to take OpenOffice behind the barn.
- EasyMark 3y agoYou mean retire it to a nice farm upstate, little Jimmy might hear the shotgun blast!
- acheron 3y ago"Here's a 4000 year old letter from a merchant to his partners describing how to avoid taxes by smuggling goods in their underwear." ( https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/trade-and-contraband-ancient-assyria https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/trade-and-contraband-anci... ) vs "Not sure if it's possible to read this 30 year old file!"
- kelnos 3y agoI get the point you're trying to make, but your former example is rare. While there are more exceedingly-old paper records that are still around and have been preserved than we might expect, we've lost so, so much. Paper and ink (and variations on that) are both fragile. Digital documents are otherwise easy to preserve indefinitely, if care is taken up-front to choose a simple document format that is likely to remain parseable (or at least documented) for a long time. And even when you don't do that, there's always the possibility of writing a parser later (assuming documentation is around) or reverse-engineering the format. And in this case, the 30-year-old file did end up getting opened, albeit not as trivially easily as one might hope.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> but your former example is rare. While there are more exceedingly-old paper records that are still around and have been preserved than we might expect, we've lost so, so much. Paper and ink (and variations on that) are both fragile. Depends what you mean by "rare". Ancient Near Eastern correspondence isn't rare at all, precisely because they didn't use paper. (And they went to war a lot.) You seem to be writing as if that letter was a paper document, but it isn't. Paper records that old only exist in Egypt. > Digital documents are otherwise easy to preserve indefinitely, if care is taken up-front to choose a simple document format that is likely to remain parseable (or at least documented) for a long time. This isn't a good match to the example either; Ancient Near Eastern records had to be deciphered. (The Semitic ones had to be deciphered. The Sumerian ones benefited from surviving documentation, but we had to find that and learn how to read it.) The original example isn't particularly apt; reading this 30-year-old file, or a similar one, is a task that one guy can do in less than a week using existing tools and know that he's done it correctly. Reading a 4000-year-old cuneiform letter was a much larger project than that.
- melomac 3y agoI was able to download and transfer the proposal document to a Mini vMac emulator, set the Finder's type and creator to those of a Microsoft Word 5 document i.e. respectively WDBN and MSWD, and finally open the document with Microsoft Word 5 for Mac to export it as a RTF document. Here you have it: https://neko.melomac.net/tmp/proposal.rtf https://neko.melomac.net/tmp/proposal.rtf I certainly agree opening a document from this Macintosh era should be, by far, easier than the process I detailed below, but this is how it is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- jgrahamc 3y agoThanks. Unfortunately, the images are all missing.
- melomac 3y agoIt is even more frustrating that the image are in the document, and Microsoft Word for Mac would still display them accurately. And LibreOffice would display the images in the RTF document in a different size (a tiny block). If my old Mac display would work, I could have been able to send the document over to CUPS via Netatalk, and make a PDF out of it. Unfortunately Mini vMac can't connect to that VM on the LAN... Anyhow, it is scandalous that opening legacy documents became such a PITA.
- bluedino 3y agoThat Mac Word screenshot gives me claustrophobic flashbacks to trying to work on those tiny screens in middle school computer lab, writing science fair papers.
- cynicalsecurity 3y agoIt wasn't so bad. It's better now, but it was fine back then.
- whoopdedo 3y agoI consider it more of not knowing how much better we could have had it. Small monitors were "normal." But I imagine people who got to work with the Portrait Display[1] (an impressive 640x870 resolution!) felt then as we do now when they had to switch back to the internal screen. [1] https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Apple_Macintosh_Portrait_Display https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Apple_Macintosh_Portrait_Displa...
- retrac 3y agoHeh, that screenshot is relatively high-resolution for the time in question, too. 800x600 maybe? The compact Macs were 512x342: https://www.betalogue.com/images/uploads/microsoft/pce-mac-word51.png https://www.betalogue.com/images/uploads/microsoft/pce-mac-w... (The toolbars, rulers, etc., could be hidden in the settings.)
- cranberryturkey 3y agolibreoffice opened it.
- kelnos 3y agoSure, but the layout was screwed up and the fonts and sizes were wrong. Certainly this is helpful: it's better to be able to open a document and then have to manually fix those issues than to be unable to open it at all. But it was far from perfect.
- EasyMark 3y agoIt's orders of magnitude better than "I can't open this file at all, -1"?
- cranberryturkey 3y agoagreed, but you could probably export as rich text or something.
- Sembiance 3y agoThis does an “okay” job at converting the document: https://archive.org/details/KeyViewPro https://archive.org/details/KeyViewPro Here is the converted PDF: https://smallpdf.com/result#r=091f20f23de353fac21376a3a49a609c&t=share-document https://smallpdf.com/result#r=091f20f23de353fac21376a3a49a60...
- jgrahamc 3y agoNot sure that's really true. It did something but the images are a mess and a lot of formatting is gone. I think LibreOffice is still the winner here.
- bilsbie 3y agoI wonder if it would be a viable business to keep running versions of computers going back say 40 years and offering to recover and convert files for people. (Just getting stuff off floppy disks and Zip drives might be useful)
- traceroute66 3y agoInterestingly, the latest and greatest version (desktop app via Office365) of Microsoft Word on Mac appears to know what it is but refuses to open it. If you drag the file onto Word, it launches a dialogue box telling you "proposal uses a file type that is blocked from opening in this version" along with a link to the supporting page on the Microsoft website[1]. [1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/error-filename-uses-a-file-type-that-is-blocked-from-opening-in-this-version-8afc36c0-67bc-43a9-a2f4-3f0b332fef24 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/error-filename-us...
- worik 3y ago> telling you "proposal uses a file type that is blocked from opening in this version" "blocked"? That sounds like Microsoft has some IP problems with their old software.
- aidenn0 3y agoNormally I have good success with abiword, but it completely barfs on this file; it seems to be falling back on its RTF support.
- noufalibrahim 3y agoOne underappreciated (though mentioned) hero in this little saga is the venerable file(1) command. proposal: Microsoft Word for Macintosh 4.0 It's so incredibly useful and so easily overlooked. I almost reflexively reach out to it when I'm curious about a file and the information it returns is just sufficient to satiate my curiosity and be useful.
- cpach 3y agoI agree, file is such a great tool. I have cursed so many times in the past when I sat in front of a work computer that ran Windows and didn’t have this tool easily available. (Later on, WSL made life easier, but now I’m luckily nearly Windows-free.)
- AdamJacobMuller 3y agoOne might even say that file has a lot of magic in it.
- pdmccormick 3y agofile has a lot of magic, but a file typically has only one magic.
- layer8 3y agoI'd say it has a number of magic.
- noufalibrahim 3y agoDefinitely uses magic to do its work.
- dorfsmay 3y agoLibreOffice is amazing, beside being able to open many document formats, it can run headless and has command line options which allow automating some tasks such as converting format that would not be possible otherwise. https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/shared/guide/start_parameters.html https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/shared/guide/... https://opensource.com/article/21/3/libreoffice-command-line https://opensource.com/article/21/3/libreoffice-command-line
- Dwedit 3y agoIs there a way to make a PS or PDF file using the actual Word for Macintosh 4? I'd think that would be the definitive render.
- aidenn0 3y agoSomewhat off-topic, but I remember Word for Windows 6.0 would take considerable time (like a minute for a 10 page document on my AM386DX/40) to reflow paragraphs across page-breaks (trying to handle widows, orphans &c). If I made an edit to the first page and hit print before it was done, I would end up with a printed document that contained either duplicated or dropped lines at page boundaries.
- jmclnx 3y agoI have a few Wang WP Documents from decades ago. I could not open them at all. Libreoffice thought they were corrupted Word Docs. So the concern about some document formats being unreadable is still valid. Who knows what obscure proprietary formats exist out there.
- jtotheh 3y agoTragically, Postscript support has been largely removed from MacOS now. Apparently the language was weird enough that supporting it made some (in)security hacks possible. I guess I'm old ! I remember first finding out about it in 1986 when is very "leet". Postscript printers were big $. I say tragically because Postscript was pretty key in making DTP as compelling as it used to be, which kind of saved the Mac in terms of being the "killer app" for it. I think you may be able to run some kind of postscript support in some tool from Adobe, or even Ghostscript. And probably, the newer software is better, but it's sad that you can't view a postscript file on macOS out of the box now.
- jasomill 3y agoWhile I agree — my first exposure to PostScript as a programming language was playing around with examples from the Adobe "blue book"[1] over a bidirectional serial connection to a LaserWriter sometime in the '80s — nothing in this document requires PostScript. The embedded images are in PICT format, and TrueType versions of the three fonts used (Courier, Helvetica, and Palatino) have shipped with all versions of the Mac OS since System 7 in 1991. And while Word 4.0 shipped in 1989, so did Adobe Type Manager[2], which supported Type 1 fonts onscreen and on non-PostScript printers, though to get a Type 1 version of Palatino for ATM at that time you'd have also needed the Adobe Plus Pack[3] (or possibly acquiring Palatino by other means; I don't recall when Adobe started selling individual fonts and the Font Folio). [1] https://archive.org/details/postscriptlangua00adobrich https://archive.org/details/postscriptlangua00adobrich [2] https://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/19/science/personal-computers-answering-questions-about-fonts.html?unlocked_article_code=1.VU0.dxAQ.D_NIVwtpcZ5q&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/19/science/personal-computer... [3] https://archive.org/details/adobe-a https://archive.org/details/adobe-a
- jxdxbx 3y agoAmazing that you can just pop up an emulator in a browser window. Retro Mac emulation used to be such a pain in the ass.
- jasomill 3y agoFor anyone interested, here's the document in modern Word format, with all vector artwork and fonts intact: https://jasomill.at/proposal.docx https://jasomill.at/proposal.docx To convert it, I first opened and re-saved using Word 98[1] running on a QEMU-emulated Power Mac, at which point it opened in modern Word for Mac (viz., version 16.82). The pictures were missing, however, with Word claiming "There is not enough memory or disk space to display or print the picture." (given 64 GB RAM with 30+ GB free at the time, I assume the actual problem is that Word no longer supports the PICT image format). To restore the images, I used Acrobat (5.0.10) print-to-PDF in Word 98 to create a PDF, then extracted the three images to separate PDFs using (modern) Adobe Illustrator, preserving the original fonts, vector artwork, size, and exact bounding box of each image. At this point, restoring the images was a simple matter of deleting the original images and dragging and dropping the PDF replacements from the Finder. For comparison, here's the PDF created by Acrobat from Word 98 on the Power Mac https://jasomill.at/proposal-Word98.pdf https://jasomill.at/proposal-Word98.pdf and here's a PDF created by modern Word running on macOS Sonoma https://jasomill.at/proposal-Word16.82.pdf https://jasomill.at/proposal-Word16.82.pdf [1] https://archive.org/details/ms-word98-special-edition https://archive.org/details/ms-word98-special-edition
- jasomill 3y agoAs an aside, MacClippy 98 knew the score: https://jasomill.at/Clippy.png https://jasomill.at/Clippy.png
- throwaway828 3y agoMacClippy seems like a useful bot. Similar to AI chat windows on websites without the second guessing.
- whoopdedo 3y agoDid you attempt to extract the pictures so they could be converted directly by another program? Archive Team says that LibreOffice can read vector PICT files[1]. And then saved as SVG. Of course you still have the font problem if it has text. I hadn't thought of using PDF to preserve vectors, but of course it does, as well as embedding the fonts. [1] http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/PICT http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/PICT
- api 3y agoToday's historic working documents will mostly be SaaS hosted documents in systems like Google Docs, Notion, etc. In the future nobody will be able to open them. They won't exist, and the software won't exist, and there will be no way to restore it since the software is SaaS that can't be emulated or even installed anywhere.
- willmadden 3y agoMS word for mac 16.16 opens it with the diagrams intact in "compatibility mode". The only issue is the text is indented slightly too far on the left. Libre Office opens it with the same quality, but has some weird gray ghost lines around tables.
- _rupertius 3y agoNow do one with Google Docs
- im_down_w_otp 3y agoThere’s a System 7.1 Mac SE/30 sitting 2ft to my right with Word 5 on it. Send it to me. I’ve got you. Using a combination of LocalTalk and two other computers on that shelf I should get it up to Office 2001 in no time.
- Bud 3y ago[dead]
- voltagex_ 3y agoITT: people repeatedly making the same mistakes, misunderstanding archival and also ignoring glaring problems with converted output
- ogurechny 3y agoJust ask The Neural Net to draw something appropriate to illustrate the given text. There's little noticeable difference. (ducks and runs away)
- LarryMade2 3y agoProps to LibreOffice Recently I was asked to locate an old form document which I found it was written in WriteNow for Macintosh, libreOffice opened it up easily (even without a filename extension) and except for some font substitutions the tables seemed to be all correct. Very impressive.
- 0xcde4c3db 3y agoSee also: "How to hire Guillaume Portes" [1] (also "autoSpaceLikeWord95" in case anyone shares that specific brainworm with me and is Ctrl+Fing for it) [1] https://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/01/how-to-hire-guillaume-portes.html https://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/01/how-to-hire-guillaume-p...
- cxr 3y agoI've been collecting notes about this file for a few years. Some of the information in this post was previously covered right here in the comments on HN a few years back: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12793157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12793157> The top reply there links to an online file(1)-like tool that identified it as a MacWrite II document. Last time I checked, the tool was updated and identifies the file as "Word for the Macintosh document (v4.0)" (pretty much what my system's file(1) says about it). We actually have a scan of Robert Cailliau's copy with his handwritten notes (including the infamous, "Vague but exciting..." remark). It's neither 20 nor 24 pages but instead 16 and differs in several respects: <https://cds.cern.ch/record/1405411 https://cds.cern.ch/record/1405411>; the version linked in the post and described erroneously as "the original" on w3.org clearly isn't the original and has been changed in several ways besides just "the date added in May 1990". Rather, the May 1990 version here is the second revision of the original that was first passed to Cailliau, and by November 1990 Berners-Lee and Cailliau were calling this second revision "HyperText and CERN"[1][2]. That is, "Information Management: A Proposal" is the one authored solely by TBL and given to Cailliau. It's not the version that appears here. "HyperText and CERN" from May 1990 is what we're looking at here, but was mistakenly also published as "Information Management: A Proposal". Later, TBL and Cailliau coauthored a joint work called "WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a Hypertext Project"[1][3] that referenced "HyperText and CERN" by name. TBL is also known to have used WriteNow—there are lots of .wn files littering w3.org. I now believe (since last summer) that it's likely that TBL authored this revision of the proposal in WriteNow (even if he didn't save it in the WriteNow format) or used WriteNow at least for the RTF export. Refer again to [2]. 1. <https://cds.cern.ch/record/2639699/files/Proposal_Nov-1990.pdf https://cds.cern.ch/record/2639699/files/Proposal_Nov-1990.p...> 2. <https://www.w3.org/Administration/HTandCERN. https://www.w3.org/Administration/HTandCERN.> 3. <https://www.w3.org/Proposal https://www.w3.org/Proposal>
- cxr 3y ago> We actually have a scan of Robert Cailliau's copy with his handwritten notes (including the infamous, "Vague but exciting..." remark). Sorry, it was late when I wrote this. That was actually Mike Sendall (though TBL and Cailliau did collaborate on the others).
- dusted 3y agoIt's an interesting problem we have with file formats.. Emulation saves us, but at which point will we need to run emulators in emulators to reach the documents ? I suppose it's still somewhat easier than trying to understand some symbols on a cave wall..
- peter_hansteen 3y agoThis reminds me of my own screed of a much simpler document (an ASCII table generated as a printer test back in the late 1980s) that was not possible to render correctly some years later - https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2013/11/compatibility-is-hard-chartestdoc-is.html https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2013/11/compatibility-is-hard-cha... - also contains a link to a further rant about other document formats that were supposed to be "standard" and "portable".
- Ellatrones 3y ago[dead]
- vman81 3y ago> I downloaded the latest Apache OpenOffice and it did open the file The last decade of Apache OpenOffice can VERY generously be described as "maintenance mode". Most of the pull requests are grammar and dictionary tweaks.
- DrNosferatu 3y agoAll you need at is at: https://infinitemac.org/1998/Mac%20OS%208.1 https://infinitemac.org/1998/Mac%20OS%208.1