Hey folks,
Got old files you can’t open any more?
Sharing this here since I have a feeling this crowd is a good audience for this…
Bob is my former roommate, genius programmer, and all-around software entrepreneur. I haven’t tried out this tool yet, but I’m sure it’s good, knowing Bob, and I think he’ll probably love the feedback from you guys.
Let me know how it works for you!
Dave
It failed on every document type I tried:
I’d try a Microsoft File 1.0 document but I can’t find it.
I didn’t see ANY of those formats mentioned so that makes sense. BTW, LibreOffice MIGHT open those ClarisWorks, Word, & Excel files.
I’m not surprised to find it has trouble viewing old files. For those who weren’t there…
It used to be that many applications either were platform-specific, or had different file formats on each platform. I think that this started to change when the Internet and ubiquitous email increased sharing of documents between machines.
It was so bad that companies like DataViz created utilities like MacLinkPlus Deluxe just to convert document formats between platforms, such as Mac Word to Windows Word. It wasn’t cheap! $99 in 1998, which is $200 in inflation dollars.
And yet, it did a bad job, because conversion of foreign file formats is hard. Really hard.
There’s another issue: forks. Classic Mac OS* used a forked file system, where each file can have a data fork and a resource fork. Applications took advantage of this. A document may store some structured data in the resource fork, such as fonts, and other data in the data fork. (Is that why my PDF 1.3 file was blank?).
At the time no other file system had forks, that I know of. Windows NTFS has forks but they’re not used by ordinary files. (One use of forks on NFTS? Malware hides there.)
And this meant that if you tried to transfer such a file to any other (non-Mac) system, or upload it, you’d corrupt the file. Upload includes importing into a browser page, such as Bob’s Old File Viewer. You lose everything in the resource fork – and some old files have all the data in that fork.
You kids these days, you don’t know how easy you have it, with your cross-platform applications and file formats.
* Current macOS still supports forks for backwards compatibility.
I would love something like this. My goto for old files I cannot open is to use FileJuicer to look inside to see if there is any data I need. Cannot keep format though. I wish I could convert old Quark files.
Yea, be sure to check if the file format is supported. It covers a crazy number of formats already, and I’m sure more will come. But not everything.
It worked on some very old MacPaint files.
Gives me the option to export to .png …
Thanks for checking it out! I’ll try to find some examples in these formats; I never had ClarisWorks. (I’m getting examples I don’t have from https://discmaster.textfiles.com/search?format=clarisWorks or you can send me things at bob@noet.com)
I don’t parse PDF since browsers do it already; it should just pass through. How does it fail?
I didn’t have a Mac in the 1990s so I need to beef up my example database; I’m also focused on things you can’t read with modern tools, so I have given the Microsoft Office 95 and later formats less attention, but I’ll get to them too. (It won’t be perfect with PowerPoint 97, for example, but does a great job with PowerPoint v1 and v2.)
If the tool gets the data fork it uses it; it even extracts icons, dialog templates and other resources into a view. (A number of the CD-ROM images I’ve downloaded from Archive.org do preserve the resource forks.)
I haven’t heard the term “data fork” in decades!
Apple was really ahead of its time. When DOS had 3-character file extensions (that you could edit to your own peril), Apple had separate fields for the kind of file and who gets to launch it, and neither one was part of the extension (you know all this :-) )
Here we are 40+ years later, and the state of the art is still mostly 3-character filename extensions (though some are longer now) :-)
This reminds me of something I still get a kick out of. I’m a SAS programmer. SAS only briefly supported the Mac, with a release of v6.12 in the mid-1990s. When they released v7 and its successors, they abandoned the Mac. On the platforms they did support, V7 also introduced a new file format, and these new files had eight-character file extensions. For example, SAS data files starting in v7 and continuing to this day have the extension “.sas7bdat”.
When SAS 6 ran on the Mac, the filenames did have extensions, matching those used by V6 on UNIX platforms. However, the files also had Mac OS type and creator codes. The creator code was “sas6”, and the type code for a data file was “bdat”.
So although they abandoned the Mac, almost 30 years later they’re still using file extensions that combine the creator and type codes they invented for their short-lived Mac release.
Dave
I was using some docs from 1997-2008, it didn’t occur to me that they weren’t old enough.
The PDF file just displayed a blank screen.
So let’s go older. The oldest files I have are from a 128K Macintosh 400K floppy disk.
Later I converted the files to other formats:
I’ll send you the Multiplan spreadsheet
