Data recovery off of a PS/note?

[LegendaryKA8]

Alrighty... this is going into some real history here, as I am assuming this is a pre-ThinkPad IBM. Hopefully some of you real gurus may be able to help me out.

I just recently found my first notebook, a PS/Note. I'm unsure of the model number or any other information other than it's a 25Mhz 386 with an 80MB HDD and that it has Win 3.1 installed. This used to be a machine my uncle used for years before he gave it to me in 2004. I thought I had actually lost it in a recent move before finding it in storage a couple of months ago. Other than the fact the battery is long dead, one of the display hinges are broken(and won't support the lid) and several keys on the keyboard are inoperative, it works like a charm.

My uncle's data is still intact on this system, including quite a bit of original writing I am sure he would like to have for nostalgia's sake... dating back to the early '90s. However, he wrote all of this on a really old DOS version of WordPerfect. These files don't even have file extensions on them. I'm sure I could easily pack them up on a floppy, but I don't know of a program which would read them.

The only idea I have would be to transfer them to a Win95/98 box(I'm considering putting W95 on my 380ED for use as a 'retro' gaming system) with its contemporary version of WordPerfect(finding an old retail copy might be difficult) and seeing if it was somehow possible to read those files, then copying them over to a more easily accessed format such as .rtf or straight ASCII text.) Even then I'm not sure if this would work. Other than that, I'm stumped.

I know this might be pretty hard to actually do, but does anyone have any ideas on how best to accomplish this?

[Paul Pennington]

This should be easy to do. Word Perfect used to be the most popular word processor. As you said, copy the Word Perfect files to one or more floppy disks. I wouldn't mess around with old versions of the program. MS Word used to come with conversions for Word Perfect, WordStar, and others available on the install CD. I don't know if current versions still have these available. I think the better way would be to Google for conversion programs. I would guess there are many out there, but I don't have a specific one to recommend. Maybe someone else can chime in here.

[Paul Pennington]

Just checked my Microsoft Word 2007: it's easier than I thought. You can open Word Perfect files directly in Word. When you go to the open file screen, use the pull-down box for the type of file to select Word Perfect.

[LegendaryKA8]

Excellent... thanks so much for the info. I'm now seriously glad my T21 has a floppy drive and can connect to the Net, so I can easily transfer files. Now all I need to do is fire up the old PS/Note and break out some floppies.