The W3C has a page with the original WWW proposal from Tim Berners-Lee. One of the downloads says The original document file (I…

The W3C has a page with the original WWW proposal from Tim Berners-Lee. One of the downloads says The original document file (I think - I can’t test it)

The “I can’t test it” made me sad. There are two other files (an RTF version and an HTML version generated in 1998 from the original file). But can we open the original document?

The original document is 68,608 bytes and file on my Mac says it’s a Microsoft Word for Macintosh 4.0 file. That matches with TBL’s note on the W3C page saying: “A hand conversion to HTML of the original MacWord (or Word for Mac?) document written in March 1989 and later redistributed unchanged apart from the date added in May 1990." 

Microsoft Office for Mac came out in 1989 with System 6.0. That was Microsoft Word 4.0 so we’re looking for compatibility with Microsoft Word for Macintosh 4.0. Let’s see what modern software can open this. What I really want to be able to do is open it and convert it to, say, PDF with high fidelity.

(via https://blog.jgc.org/2024/02/the-original-www-proposal-is-word-for.html )