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 system, or upload it, you’d corrupt the file. Upload includes importing into a browser page, such as Bob’s Old File Viewer.
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 …