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My mom shared some old files from our 1996 macintosh, I believe it was an Apple IIc Plus. They are listed in Info as type "Unix Executable File" so the default application is terminal, but they don't open successfully with it. They contain binary, per `cat` ...
Thoughts? Any way to scrape the data out into ASCII? They contain only text. Thanks
"Unix executable" means it has no extension - which few mac files had in those days.
cat might have printed out the resource fork rather than the data fork.
If it is truly text, simply add a .txt extension and open it in Text Edit. You might get half a page or so of gobbledy gook, but then you should get to the text data.
That worked! There's a bunch of garbage text surrounding the actual text and most line breaks have been lost, but it's there. So cool, thanks Keith!
PS: I think it was maybe a Word Perfect, that name rings a bell for me. Not sure why or if extension was lost, but mod date looks correct. Some are from 1991 lol
I have no idea about the Apple II file systems, but early Mac systems used "File Creator Codes" and "File Type Codes" embedded in what was called the "Resource Fork" of the file. No extension necessary.
As time marched on, and Apple went to OSX, they finally aligned themselves with the rest of the world and started using file extensions. Resource Forks were dropped. Per unix conventions, files without extensions are assumed to be programs.
The free LibreOffice Suite can open Word Perfect documents and an extensive collection of other document formats from the past or present. The WP word processing documents use a .wps extension and with LO installed, one can right-click and choose Open With > LibreOffice. LibreOffice does not make up for any WP documents that used specialized extensions in their creation.
LibreOffice 24.2.3 is supported by macOS Catalina and later.
How to Open Files Created on an Apple from 1996? I believe it was an Apple IIc Plus
