Opening old DEC files

[Antonio Carlini]

On 21/03/2019 19:50, Curt Vendel via cctalk wrote:
> I have many DEC files that I’ve recovered from old VMS backups to a PC.
>
> Many are Word-11, ALL-IN-1 WPS and VMS Mail MAI files.
>
> They don’t open well in programs like the Windows Text editors
>
> Is there a program on Windows that can open these files and recognize all of the formatting and control commands so they can be properly viewed?


I remember using a non-DEC word processor on VAX/VMS at uni: it was 
either MASS-11 or WORD-11.

I don't know how you would read that on anything other than VMS with the 
original word processor software.


.MAI files are from the VMS Mail utility. The easy way to read those is 
to use VMS (maybe on SIMH if you don't have the hardware).

There might be DECUS utilities that would pull apart VMS mail files for 
you and turn them into something else.

This does remind me that I have a whole chunk of VMSMAIL messages 
myself, so perhaps I should look into something like this too!


I do know that DEC was one of the first large users of MS Outlook. As 
part of the move away from VMSMAIL there was a conversion utility that 
would take your VMSMAIL files and turn them into an outlook PST (I 
think). From there there are tools that can turn a PST into eml files.


There was a PC version of ALL-IN-1 (or maybe it was just the WPS part). 
That existed at the same time as the VMS ALL-IN-1 product so surely it 
must be able to read those files? That's assuming you can find a copy of 
the program. I never used it in anger, so I've no idea whether it 
supported exporting to other formats.


Antonio


-- 
Antonio Carlini
antonio at acarlini.com