The original WWW proposal is a Word for Macintosh 4.0 file from 1990, can we open it?

I had the great good fortune to have been involved with two projects involving early web history at CERN. One focussed on the Line Mode Browser, the second, much simpler browser for terminals developed in 1991, the other on the original NeXT based WWW browser.

We got to delve into early source code, and get a NeXT Cube from that era connected to the Web (physical cabling wasn’t too difficult, the software network layer was another story!)

One thing that is trivially easy to do is open a web page form that era on any web browser today (or ever written). literally billions of devices can read this (a slightly updated version of the very first of now perhaps as many as a trillion web pages ever to have existed).

But ironically, a page with the original WWW proposal from Tim Berners-Lee, (a copy of which I have held in my own hands) was written in Microsoft Word 4 for the Mac (I almost certainly had that very software) and basically no one has been able to open it faithfully. So John Graham-Cumming tried doing that. A salutary tale about how digital documents rot as much if not more than paper based ones.

Which makes the Web’s backwards compatibility evermore remarkable.