“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.”
The founding document of the web is a 68,608-byte Word for Macintosh 4.0 file, and Microsoft Word can no longer open it. Apple Pages failed too. LibreOffice got the diagrams right and the font sizes wrong, so the only faithful copy came from booting a 1990 Mac in an emulator. Thirty-four years is all it took for a proprietary format to lock out the document that made open formats matter.