[TriLUG] Old Mac files: any ideas how to open them?

[Aaron S. Joyner]

Andrew Perrin wrote:

> Greetings, folks.
>
> My wife has a folder of old (circa 1991) files created on her 
> Macintosh Plus during medical school. Neither of us can remember what 
> word processor she used to write these.
>
> They now reside in a folder on her computer, and we would like to be 
> able to open them. However, just opening them in emacs, Word, etc., 
> produces gibberish. I get the following output from file:
>
> aperrin at joehill:/mnt/elianasdocs/OLDMAC$ file 3RDLAB~1
> 3RDLAB~1: TTComp archive data
>
>
>
>
> Does this ring a bell to anyone? Any ideas where to go with it?
>
> Thanks.
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Andrew J Perrin - andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu - 
> http://perrin.socsci.unc.edu
> Assistant Professor of Sociology; Book Review Editor, _Social Forces_
> University of North Carolina - CB#3210, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3210 USA
> New Book: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/178592.ctl
>
>
Sounds like a zip file?  Try renaming it to have a .zip extension and 
running unzip -t <filename>.  Googling around for TTComp archive data 
seems to indicate that TTComp is a PKZIP-compatible archive program for 
the Mac of days gone by, seemingly made by a company called SWFTE?  I'm 
mostly guessing from Google context, so I could also be totally off-base.

Let us know what you find out!
Aaron S. Joyner