LibreOffice brings the old

Twenty-two years ago, I wrote a thesis. It wasn’t a very good thesis, but it did what it needed to do. For years, its model files have been unreadable, because the spreadsheets were written in a ~1992 version of Microsoft Works. These are old files:

1993-04-21 03:19 newmodel.wks
1993-04-21 03:19 newmodel.wk1
1993-04-08 06:29 pr_fa.wks

Quite recently, LibreOffice realized that there are old files out there that (unlike my thesis models) could still be useful. As they have no commercial requirement to only support the latest and greatest, LibreOffice added the ability to read these ancient works. So my old stuff lives again:

ms works files from 1993

I found a screen dump that I used back in ’93 to illustrate the layout. The display was colour, but here it is brought back to life with a little bit of antialiasing:

'93 print stylee

LibreOffice can also read old AppleWorks files. Although Works 6 still runs on Catherine‘s Mac, it looks a bit … dated:

appleworks

Thanks, LibreOffice! It’s sometimes easy to forget (like right after updated to Ubuntu 15.04, which decided that BlueTooth support was kinda optional unless you jumped through hoops …) that people do write software just to be more useful.

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