I'm always being ask to retrieve data from old computers and once in a
while need to recover ancient Word Perfect documents which do not even
have a suffix. Though I can open them with Libre Office, the text is
garbled to varying degrees.

I recently dug out a Win7 machine that had Word 2003 on it and when I
attempted to open one of the documents, I got a message saying it needed
to install additional codex and did so...presumably from the cached installation files.

With a little trial and error, I used the Western European IA5 and I'll
be darned...the documents were exactly right.

I then decided to see how well Word 2003 functioned on my Ubuntu machine
using WINE.

I made sure to opt for leaving the installation files cached but when I
tried to open a WP document, I got no option to import the necessary
format I needed.

Not that this is a big deal...just curious if it can be done.

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philo wrote:

I'm always being ask to retrieve data from old computers and once in a while  need to recover ancient Word Perfect documents which do not even
have a suffix.

Really old WP docs from say 80s didn't have an extension. Others before
.wpd were .wp, .wp7, .wp6, .wp5, and .wp4.

Corel provides a free 30d trial of WP which will work w/ W7 32 or 64.
Maybe it could be used to convert, it will open such as .wp files. .wp7
was from W95 WP. .wp6 was a DOS WP. .wp was from dos or W3.1, so I
would also say that .wp6 & .wp5 were also DOS or the early W.

You can also dl an old WP for Win http://www.oldversion.com/windows/wordperfect-5-1

That might be your best bet.



--
Mike Easter

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Mike Easter wrote:

philo wrote:

I'm always being ask to retrieve data from old computers and once in a
while  need to recover ancient Word Perfect documents which do not even
have a suffix.

Really old WP docs from say 80s didn't have an extension.  Others before .wpd were .wp, .wp7, .wp6, .wp5, and .wp4.

You can also dl an old WP for Win http://www.oldversion.com/windows/wordperfect-5-1

Further reading reveals:

... there was a Corel Linux AND

... there was a WP for Linux at v. 8 & 9. A Corel linux distro included
the WP 8.

--
Mike Easter

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Microsoft Word 2003 does a good job so I'm staying with it.
I have tried to use Word Perfect years ago and did not like it. I'm too
spoiled by the newer software.

Of note is most of the stuff I'm recovering is on 5.25" floppies.

I'm amazed at how most of them are still good.
Some had bad sectors but only two so far were completely dead.

In the box of floppies there was also a cleaning kid for 5.25" drives
that I used.

LOL it's been 50 years since I've smelled trichlorethelene...long ago
banned I believe.

Good think my work room is well ventilated.

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philo wrote:

Of note is most of the stuff I'm recovering is on 5.25" floppies.

In terms of reliability, what has been your experience comparing that of
5.25 w/ 3.5? Also what about the different densities of 3.5: 360, 720,
1.44?

I still have some never used 3.5 floppies. I also still have some 100
meg Iomega Zip disks.

--
Mike Easter

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On 7/14/24 3:37 PM, Mike Easter wrote:

philo wrote:

Of note is most of the stuff I'm recovering is on 5.25" floppies.

In terms of reliability, what has been your experience comparing that of
5.25 w/ 3.5?  Also what about the different densities of 3.5: 360, 720, 1.44?

I still have some never used 3.5 floppies.  I also still have some 100
meg Iomega Zip disks.

Maybe because of the greater surface area, the 5.25" seem to hold up
better than the 1.44.

Quite a few of the 1.44 that I tested were just plain bad.
the mfg makes a difference though.

I think all the cheap RadioShack drives were bad but most of the
Microsoft floppies were good...the distribution media variety are quite reliable.

As to different densities, I don't know.

I did take a few 1.44 with a lot of bad sectors and format them as 720
which show all good.


Thus far, out of the ones I have that are still new,,,quite a few have
bad sectors but none have been totally defective

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