Q: I am very disconcerted by Mavericks.  We installed it and then found that Appleworks and AOL were completely disabled.  There was no warning before hand and much valuable data has been lost!    I am not a happy camper!

Reinstall the backup you made before choosing to upgrade to Mavericks.

Pete

AppleWorks was discontinued in 2007!

AOL Desktop for Mac has not been officially updated for even longer! However I did find the following beta version which 'improves' Mavericks compatibility.

See https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/26028/aol-desktop

AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) is still supported, see http://www.aim.com

You can still use the web interface to access your AOL stuff that is on their servers. (Try http://mail.aol.com in your browser & log in.) If you are talking about locally stored stuff created with the (ancient!) AOL app, you may be able to use the beta software John mentioned to access it.

Many Appleworks docs can be opened with the iWork apps (if you have them).

Or with current 4.2.2 release of LibreOffice. If those AppleWorks documents are a mixture of WP, SpreadSheet, and graphics, they may not open politely in the iWork ’09 application suite. Pages v5.1, Numbers v3.1, and Keynote v6.1 will not open ANY AppleWorks documents.

What OS were you running before? AppleWorks certainly wouldn't run on Mountain Lion or Lion. As said, AppleWorks was "end-of-lifed" years ago, and if you continued to use it, then you really should have been looking for alternatives.

Software comes and goes -- nothing lasts forever. However, the important thing is that your data survives, and this means migrating from one app to another as time marches on.

Being totally dependent on an ancient unsupported app is no good place to be.

benwiggy wrote:

 

.......AppleWorks was "end-of-lifed" years ago, and if you continued to use it, then you really should have been looking for alternatives.

 

Software comes and goes -- nothing lasts forever.....

I feel your pain. I had thousands of important AW files, many of them previously converted from ClarisWorks (which Apple also abandoned). The worst case was a massive AppleWorks client database with 100s of entries, and lots of information in each entry, about each client.

By abandoning AppleWorks, Apple generated a ton of additional, thankless work for me.

Luckily I regularly read some Apple discussion sites, so I knew that Rosetta was going to be abandoned after Snow Leopard That gave me time to convert all my AW files, painfully, one by one, to other formats. But not everyone regularly reads Apple discussion sites and many had no idea that Rosetta was going to be discontinued. It was unpleasant to see the Apple fanbois sneering at them for not knowing.

So don't let yourself become reliant on any Apple software, now or at any time in the future. At some point in the future Apple will leave you standing; that's what Apple's track record tells us.  Your AppleWorks files MAY be openable with iWork but not database or drawing files. But don't become dependent on iWork either - for the reasons outlined above. I suggest it would be better to go for MSOffice, which means that you can also use freeware office suites such as LibreOffice.

MSWord can even sometimes open AppleWorks files directly (but only by also dumping hundreds of useless pages of gobbledegook) - in a pinch, you might find this useful to know.

Here is a recent post that I assembled to summarize your options (and if you only upgraded your existing Mac to Mavericks and did not purchase a new Mac, then you have both options:

First, read these excellent articles on Appleworks migration:

 

Appleworks for the modern day, a migration tip by a brody; and

 

Abandoning Appleworks by Roger Wilmut.

 

If you want to continue to run Appleworks 6 in Mavericks; for example to export some data from a database, which cannot be opened by any other program, or otherwise:

 

a)  If your Mac will still boot into Snow Leopard, partition your hard drive (or add an external hard drive) and install Snow Leopard (and the optional Rosetta) into it and use the "dual-boot" method to boot into Snow Leopard and run Appleworks 6; or

 

b)  Install Snow Leopard Server into Parallels and run Appleworks 6 concurrently with Lion, Mt. Lion and Mavericks:

 

                              [click on image to enlarge]

 

More information here:

 

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1365439

 

Installing Snow Leopard Server into Parallels for DUMMIES!:

 

http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=17285039&postcount=564