https://blog.jgc.org/2024/02/the-original-www-proposal-is-word-for.html John Graham-Cumming's blog 2024-02-13 The original WWW proposal is a Word for Macintosh 4.0 file from 1990, can we open it? The W3C has a page with the original WWW proposal from Tim Berners-Lee. One of the downloads says * The original document file (I think - I can't test it) The "I can't test it" made me sad. There are two other files (an RTF version and an HTML version generated in 1998 from the original file). But can we open the original document? The original document is 68,608 bytes and file on my Mac says it's a Microsoft Word for Macintosh 4.0 file. That matches with TBL's note on the W3C page saying: "A hand conversion to HTML of the original MacWord (or Word for Mac?) document written in March 1989 and later redistributed unchanged apart from the date added in May 1990." Microsoft Office for Mac came out in 1989 with System 6.0. That was Microsoft Word 4.0 so we're looking for compatibility with Microsoft Word for Macintosh 4.0. Let's see what modern software can open this. What I really want to be able to do is open it and convert it to, say, PDF with high fidelity. Microsoft Word Let's begin with Microsoft Word itself. I uploaded the file to Microsoft OneDrive with the extension .doc and clicked on it to open it in Microsoft Word. [proposal-1] Apple Pages I switched to the Mac and hoped that Apple Pages might understand an old Microsoft Word for Macintosh file. No such luck. [proposal-2] Apache OpenOffice Next let's hope open source software will come to the rescue. I downloaded the latest Apache OpenOffice and it did open the file but the formatting is gone and the diagrams are missing. [proposal-3] LibreOffice OK, maybe I need different open source software, so I switched to the latest LibreOffice and it opened it. And the diagrams are crisp! Although there's something weird about the margins and there are other formatting problems. [proposal-4] CERN PDF CERN makes available a PDF version of the proposal which was apparently created in 1998 using Acrobat Distiller Daemon 2.1 for SunOS/Solaris (SPARC). It has 20 pages. The LibreOffice imported version has 24 pages. To get an overview of what's different I created a PDF from the LibreOffice version and then looked at it and the CERN PDF in the contact sheet version in Apple Preview. Here's the CERN PDF: [proposal-5] Here's the LibreOffice-generated PDF: [proposal-6] Things that are different: 1. The right-hand margin is missing in the LibreOffice version. 2. The LibreOffice version is using 14 pt vs. 12 pt for most of the text. 3. The LibreOffice version has turned headers with TBL's initials in them into footers. 4. The page breaks look in the right places (see how the images are correctly placed towards the end); thus it's probably the font size that's the biggest problem. 5. There CERN PDF has a space under the heading and the LibreOffice version does not. Emulation To make sure that I knew what the actual original document looked like I decided to use Infinite Mac to boot a 1990-era Macintosh and run actual Word for Macintosh 4.0 on the original document. [proposal-9] That way I can see actual fonts, font sizes and layout to confirm how the document should have looked. And that's where it became obvious that the original document on the original Mac and the CERN PDF are quite different. The CERN PDF has 20 pages. On the Mac running Word for Macintosh 4.0 with A4 paper it has 22 pages. So I decided to aim to get us close to the original document on the Mac. [proposal-10] So... set to A4 paper and set right margin to same size as left margin. Change the first page format to be different since it doesn't have the same gutters, footers or headers. Manually change the body text from 14 pt (and other sizes) to 12 pt. Manually deal with text that breaks across pages incorrectly and other alignment problems. Fix the footer that should be a header. In the end I got pretty close to what's visible on the Mac. [proposal-11] Conclusion Converting this document from its original format was a bit of a victory for open source software. And a lesson in how hard document preservation is. To help preserve it a bit, and in an open format, I've uploaded my .odt version to GitHub here. It's interesting, and a little disheartening to see that this 34 year old document is difficult to open, and even when opened the resulting output isn't exactly the same as the original. PS If you're wondering why I ever started this project. I just wanted a high quality version of the diagrams in the original proposal for a presentation. Took me a lot longer than I thought it would. PPS A comment on Hacker News pointed out that I could probably either create a PostScript file or a PDF via an emulated Mac. I was able to boot another Mac (System 7) that had Word from 1992 and Print2PDF (a driver that creates a printer that makes a PDF file) and print directly from Word for Macintosh 5.1a. [proposal-12] I've added the generated PDF file to the GitHub. This version has 20 pages and the fonts are different but it does meet my original requirement of a PDF. at February 13, 2024 Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Labels: pseudo-randomness 6 comments: [blo] matt said... LibreOffice opens it right up. It's support for old document formats is really excellent. I keep it around for just this purpose. https://imgur.com/a/JENgq6V But I also love using BasiliskII and InfiniteMac emulators! 3:00 PM [icon_delet] [blo] Nick Alcock said... It's pretty unsurprising that Apache OpenOffice has trouble, given that that fork of what used to be StarOffice has been dead more or less since it joined Apache (and since long before it left the incubator), and hasn't managed even critical security releases for many years: indeed this state of total deadness is why LibreOffice exists. They literally don't even have anyone left "working" on the zombie project who knows how to build it any more. All it has is the name. It's a scandal that it's still there, misleading people into using something more than half a decade dead, and not redirecting people straight to LibreOffice. (The fact that in more than half a decade they have neither done any releases nor retired the project nor even done the much simpler job of simply *redirecting people to the project that is still alive* despite many people begging them to says everything you need to know about the bad faith of the remaining "contributors". They appear to see OpenOffice purely as a thing to let them say on their CVs that they are on an Apache PMC. If it was finally retired they wouldn't be able to do that.) 4:14 PM [icon_delet] [blo] stuaxo said... This is great. It would be good to have a couple of upstream bugs in libreoffice to fix the remaining formatting issues, the document itself probably works as a test case. 4:23 PM [icon_delet] [blo] tgegrteg said... I have a mac plus in the shed which probably still works and would be useful for this very sort of thing. Alternatively BasiliskII and word from here h ttps://www.macintoshrepository.org/ 1110-microsoft-word-3-01-4-0-5-0-5-1-5-1a-personalize-word-1-0 5:50 PM [icon_delet] [bla] [rec] Robert said... This conversion software converts it great: https://archive.org/ details/KeyViewPro Here is the converted PDF: https://smallpdf.com/result#r= 091f20f23de353fac21376a3a49a609c&t=share-document 5:59 PM [icon_delet] [bla] [psm] Peter S Magnusson said... not quite, look more carefully, for example it clobbers some of the diagrams. and that's what the OP was originally after. 6:57 PM [icon_delet] Post a Comment Older Post Home Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) Labels * pseudo-randomness * hardware * babbage * anti-spam * gnu make * retro * security * codes and ciphers * the geek atlas * mathematics * minitel * behind the screens * popfile * privacy * radio Popular Posts * [mac-1] My daily driver is older than I thought; it's positively vintage! I was doing some clean up on my main laptop and realized it had been a while since bought a new computer. Turns out it was a lot older than ... * [proposal-1] The original WWW proposal is a Word for Macintosh 4.0 file from 1990, can we open it? 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