Thanks for the research, Jeff. That's some good summary data. Thank you.

If anyone has working versions of some of the original sector creation/exporting for Traveller and or has some files from that era, that might be a route to find out what file format the SUBSECTOR.000 file is.

It's possible the .DAT file is an output from some app that I may have but am forgetting (it's also generic enough as an extension that it may not map to said application). If I get into my older machines, I'll see what kicked out .DAT files (for some reason, I'm thinking some form of database app). DBase comes to mind but I could be mis-recalling.

As to email formats... that's a big area. My first inclination would have been to try see if they were .PSTs. .MBOX is another. I am sure there must have been a couple of standards on Unix boxes back then but I don't know what those would be. Mac probably had one too... but if it was dumped from a Mac, then you're lucky they parse as readable in a simple file dump.

I wonder if there aren't some sites or tools out there to salvage old mail archives even if you don't know the type. One would think corporations would have needed this long since.

My father in law has an old Mac. It may actually have MacDraw installed. That would mean I'd have to interact with a Jobsian-system, but for a good cause, I may try, may God Rest My Eternal Soul. I'll see what the situation is. He had a prior Mac (which goes back to the Cretaceous age) that may have had Mac Draw and maybe the (still old but not as old) current old machine does not, but I thought I saw a Mac Draw box recently in house cleaning. The only way to be sure is to stick my head into the lion's mouth (Ha ha, I made a cat related Apple OS joke...).

I suppose to that any errata from files could be consolidated into a some more modern formats and examined to see if any ought to have been part of Don's magnum opuses.

On Mon, Sep 7, 2020 at 5:08 AM <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

I wonder if anything with SUBSECTOR in the title that's not readable is some binary format from some sort of application.
If one uses a raw ASCII text dump, there might be some clues.
On the other hand, if it was an image of some sort or a binary dump from an application, you might well not have any text strings to even identify it with.

I may have a Win95 machine still around, an NT 4 machine around, and some XP machines around. Not sure if all will boot or not, but if some do, maybe some of the viewers and such from the old days might allow me to decode some of the stuff. Failing that, I probably have some tools for inspecting binaries there. Over the next weeks and months, I need to triage that pile of old boxen and decide which, if any, are worth keeping around.
Now, with any of those, if I get a hardware failure, that's probably end of the line, esp in the drive.

I do have plans to capture all my data via TCP/IP network from them and that should be easy because drive sizes were a at least 3 orders of magnitude (more likely 4 or 5) larger than what I have now.

Anyway, if I get any of the really old boxes up, I'll see if I can help with individual files.

It strikes me that, where possible, if we can open these files, we should try to crank out some exports to more modern formats if they can be generated.

Tom B

On Sun, Sep 6, 2020 at 11:38 PM Kelly St. Clair <xxxxxx@efn.org> wrote:
On 9/6/2020 8:24 PM, Jeff Zeitlin wrote:
> I've been going through my copy of the files on the HIWG CD; I've
> discovered the following:

(snip)

> I didn't get past that point; it's getting late, and I'm getting tired.
> More possibly tomorrow, or later this week.
This is some fine digital archaeology, Jeff. Thank you for your efforts.

Should you run into any problematic documents from the Word Perfect
group, be advised I have a version of that (11) running natively on my
own system, and might be able to open them if you can't.

--
---------------
Kelly St. Clair
xxxxxx@efn.org

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