Interpreting an ancient Macintosh file?

Tralce · 12-10-2006, 04:40 PM

My father wrote a book and his publisher typed it up on an old mac. The year was 1993, to give you an idea of what MACOS it may have been running. Anyway, I have these files: !SCOTT'S.2(M and !SCOTT'S.BOO. I've tried several Macintosh character sets in OOo2 but to no avail. Konqueror's Embedded Binary Viewer yields a little bit of readable text with pages of binary junk in between. Any good known ways of importing this into something (human) readable?

AnanthaP · 12-11-2006, 04:52 AM

OOo2 doesn't even support all old versions of star office. So you need to look at some apple specific sites or sites for "vintage-computer"s etc.

End

Tralce · 12-11-2006, 06:04 AM

Is "Star Office" the name of the application it was written in?

michaelk · 12-11-2006, 07:35 AM

No since OO did not exist in 1993. Looking up the extension did not provide any relevent information. .boo could be some kind of image file. I am trying to remember the specific Mac application for publishing... It will take time to dig into the old brain cells.

Could be Adobe Pagemaker or QuarkXpress. A google might find something that can convert these documents but it is not going to be an easy task.

indienick · 12-11-2006, 11:52 PM

If you're wondering what program that extention belongs to, try filext.com.

Doing a quick search there, the results were:
-Book
-Compressed Archive File
-IBM BookManager Book
-Image File
-Kermit Protocol Binary Bootstrap File

Hope that helps at all.

Dragineez · 12-12-2006, 11:59 AM

Do Mac files even have extensions? Are they necessary? Do they mean anything if they do exist? One wonders.

Have you tried using file to see if it can tell you anything about the format?

makyo · 12-12-2006, 12:25 PM

Hi.

I have used CanOpener on Mac and Windows with some success. It's not free, but it may save you time ... cheers, makyo

http://www.abbottsys.com/

Tralce · 12-12-2006, 02:16 PM

File tells me that the .2)p one is "data" and the .boo is "ISO-8859 English text, with very long lines, with CR line terminators" What is this telling me? I can open the .boo in Kate and it looks OK but the .2)p one is the one that matters and it's unreadable by Kate.

Furlinastis · 12-12-2006, 03:40 PM

You could try using an emulator. I know there's an emulator for the old mac OS floating around the net somewhere. The only problem is finding the BIOS dump.