The original WWW proposal

John Graham-Cumming asks The original WWW proposal is a Word for Macintosh 4.0 file from 1990, can we open it?:

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?

Indeed. Lots of historical documents are in electronic formats that are undocumented. This include old Microsoft Word formats.

Graham-Cumming was up to the challenge.

Turns out LibreOffice can open it, render it, but the page count is off compared to the PDF (created almost a decade later). Now I remember Microsoft Word 4.0 for Macintosh (the original word processor used for this document) reformatting the document after changing the printer model to print to. So I’m not surprised, but this has a bit more imperfections, and using an emulator with the original software, runinng in the browser, no less, helped reproducing it.