Office 365 will open the document but doesn’t have a converter for the picture (or it’s blocked.) I haven’t dug into if it’s possible to override that.
The original KB (https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index.php/Microsoft_KB_Archive/922849) suggests formats this old have been dropped altogether, which is incorrect; Word 2007 opened this document fine. One wonders who complained loudly after a proposal to drop them was circulated.
I’m really surprised at how much better LibreOffice does than OpenOffice. That suggests that someone has put serious effort in the last five or so years into improving reading for ancient Word files. Does one of the LibreOffice backers have a big customer with a load of these things? Or is this basically the same RTF-with-a-load-of-undocumented-keys file format as other old versions of Word?
I have a few ClarisWorks for Windows 1.0 docs that are in a similar state: nothing opens them. I actually bought the last MacOS Classic version of AppleWorks (ClarisWorks after Apple bought them), but it can’t open anything that old. I think I have a copy of ClarisWorks on floppy disk somewhere, so could install that in Windows 3.1 in DOSBox and export as something else (or, at least, print to PDF).
For kicks I tried MS Office.
The original KB (https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index.php/Microsoft_KB_Archive/922849) suggests formats this old have been dropped altogether, which is incorrect; Word 2007 opened this document fine. One wonders who complained loudly after a proposal to drop them was circulated.
I’m really surprised at how much better LibreOffice does than OpenOffice. That suggests that someone has put serious effort in the last five or so years into improving reading for ancient Word files. Does one of the LibreOffice backers have a big customer with a load of these things? Or is this basically the same RTF-with-a-load-of-undocumented-keys file format as other old versions of Word?
I have a few ClarisWorks for Windows 1.0 docs that are in a similar state: nothing opens them. I actually bought the last MacOS Classic version of AppleWorks (ClarisWorks after Apple bought them), but it can’t open anything that old. I think I have a copy of ClarisWorks on floppy disk somewhere, so could install that in Windows 3.1 in DOSBox and export as something else (or, at least, print to PDF).
Either the German or French government are presumably to thank.
I’m not sure GitHub is the best place to preserve such document. I would be better to upload it to archive.org
Personally I’d have used Mac Word 4 w/ PostScript file output, then use Adobe’s distiller on that. Indeed, that looks like what CERN’s done at least.
Print2PICT is also always fun for a retro pixel look.