I've got an old, near collector's item Mac that's running Mac OS 8.6, and recently Appletalked (via 802.11b!) some files from an old Mac desktop. Many of the files were in ClarisWorks format (phew, these are classic references), and I haven't installed Claris/AppleWorks on the 8.6er yet.

I do, however, have Word98 available.

Guess what happens when I try and open a ClarisWorks doc? That's right -- MacLinkPlus wakes up, checks the system for a proper word processor, and figures out there's nothing ready to catch the file. But it doesn't stop there -- a message pops up saying that the "Microsoft Word" on my system hadn't been written at the time my version of MacLinkPlus was released, but that it's going to translated into Word 6.0 format and give it a shot anyhow.

Now *that's* impressive. I'm not sure if Word98 had anything to do with linking itself to the ClarisWorks docs, but to me, the user, it doesn't matter. What I've got is a seamless process on Mac OS bringing an awfully out of date format on an awfully out of date OS into a somewhat recent version of Word. Whoever added the forward compatiblity function to these apps, possibly even just within MacLinkPlus, which might have just "guessed" Word98 was something close to what it understands (possibly from a four-char file type?), deserves a raise. ;^)