Foolestroupe -

You need an archaeologist for all your old stuff.
Or maybe a taxidermist. Someone once told me "old farts like you should all get stuffed."

I haven't seen any problem with my current Word programs reading files produced by any older Word, even going back to DOS versions, with the exception of some files that came from very old "Works" programs. There was briefly a .CRD format that was difficult to bring forward, that might be present in stuff as ancient as yours. Most of even the .WKS and .CRD stuff could be "salvaged" to save the good pieces, but some didn't come across as what you could call "intact" or even with everything in them.

The really old files I have all have been "progressively updated" by opening them in newer versions and resaving as each new version came along. Going back to the nth generation of ancestors in a single leap may be a little more difficult.

Some earlier versions of Word, when crossmating with 'Nix and Mac programs had a problem particularly with the CR (carriage return) that sometimes garbled things. The "glyph" (ANSI 0182, U+00B6, char name Pilcrow) "¶" used to show paragraph breaks in Word actually combined two char. Unix used the same(?) two char, a CR + LF but sometimes in reverse order from the Word usage. Nobody quite knows (to have documented it at the time) what Macs did.

Additonally, the Unix/Mac vs Microsoft "bit reversal" - bigendian vs littleendian - translation often messed things up. Insertion of Esc chars for printer command/control also sometimes resulted in strange things; and poor handling of Esc chars - according to vague memory - sometimes could result in "null char artifacts." I'm not sure I've still got anything that old on the shelf to refresh the memory from.

First recommendation, of course, would be to locate all the bad files and isolate them. Make copies to play with and don't touch the originals again until you've figured out something that works. (But you've already done that, of course.)

If the old files are/were on floppy disks, I'd have to say that my experience with long-term archiving on floppies is extremely poor. Even under ideal conditions, bits get dropped. The problem may be that the disks don't actually contain "real files" any more if that's how they've been stored, rather than that the files are in a different format.

The last time I ran into a few files that didn't want to come across, I think I used BASIC to do char-by-char inspect and replace, but it's been decades since I've even had a usable BASIC. That disappeared from default kits when hard drives were invented. You might have to fall back on something like edlin(?). If so, condition yourself to think like a masochist - "The pain is such a joy."

(I wonder if I really can remember any of that old stuff?????)

John