What's the filetype of this old mac "references" file from an old research paper?
December 1, 2007 6:56 AM   Subscribe

What Mac program would I have been likely to use to write the references section of a scientific paper in 1993 or 1994? I have the file, and I want to open it or convert it. (file link inside...)

This file is the "references" section of a short (probably lousy) scientific paper I wrote (on a Mac) at a US university. I would like to open this file, or convert it to something clean and readable. If I wrote the related paper on a university Macintosh in Word in 93 or 94, what program might I have been using to collect and write up the references section? I vaguely recall another student teaching me to use a separate program for references, but that's all I can remember. The file was just labeled "references" in my archive of old floppies - you can even go see the file here. (I can see some text info in the file if I force it to open in Word or BBEdit, but I'd like to get a quick and clean and complete conversion of exactly what was in this file originally.)
posted by chr1sb0y to Computers & Internet (10 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
My guess would be EndNote
posted by substrate at 7:09 AM on December 1, 2007


I tried opening it in word and instead of selecting a file type to convert from, I selected the option "Extract text from any file."

The results came back unformatted, but all the text was there. It looked like this.

"Arnold, M., and Sheppard, S. M. F.
^East Pacific Rise at latitude 21˚N: isotopic composition and origin of the hydrothermal sulfur
Earth and Plan. Sci. L.
Vol. 56
pp. 148-156
Bluth, G. J., and Ohmoto, H.
USulfide-Sulfate chimneys on the EPR, 11˚ and 13˚N latitudes. Part 2: Sulfur Isotopes
Can. Min.
Vol. 26
pp. 505-515
posted by kdern at 7:12 AM on December 1, 2007


not sure what format the file was in, but if you are on a Mac (or any other *nix variant) you can open up a terminal and run the standard strings utility on the file - all of the bibliographic info you mention shows up clear as day towards the end of the output.
so from the terminal, do:

strings reference

and you'll see the output.
posted by namewithoutwords at 7:13 AM on December 1, 2007


I believe it's a MacWrite II file. It has embedded PostScript in it, which a bit of research tells me MacWrite used. I'm looking into conversion utilities now.
posted by cerebus19 at 7:44 AM on December 1, 2007


cerebus19 wrote...
I believe it's a MacWrite II file.

According to this, MacWrite II files should start with 0xfe37, which this file does not.

Still searching for an alternative though...
posted by tkolar at 9:27 AM on December 1, 2007


Have you run "file" on it? That is, go to terminal, and type "file [filename/path]". It's often vague, and may not be able to identify it, but there's a pretty decent chance that'll tell you the format.
posted by spaceman_spiff at 9:37 AM on December 1, 2007


It's an Endnote file.

I converted it with Endnote 8 and you can grab a converted file here.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:45 AM on December 1, 2007


It's not like this is a 300 page doc. You can see the text in most any text editor. I'd just recreate the file, rather than trying to find the mysterious program, and an old computer that can run it. Unless, of course, you have 300 or these documents.
posted by cjorgensen at 9:48 AM on December 1, 2007


Best answer: And here is a file with the references in RTF, if you don't have Endnote on hand.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:48 AM on December 1, 2007 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: Thanks, Blazecock Pileon! That's EXACTLY what I was hoping to obtain. I <3 metafilter.
posted by chr1sb0y at 12:04 PM on December 1, 2007


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