Old Mac help needed

[fbhjr]

Back in the late 80’s when my father retired from the power company after 52 years of working there, we asked him to write down the stories of his life.
For a while, he did. Each week when he wrote me his letter, he included a page of memories.
At first, these were interesting stories from when he was young. As they were hand written, I copied them into the computer.
Eventually, he just started copying old diary pages, and that wasn’t as interesting. (Monday: had cereal for breakfast. Anne went to school. Train was 4 minutes late. Tuesday: had cereal for breakfast. Anne went to school. Trains were on time. etc.)
He eventually got in an argument with my mother about it and stopped.
But, those early ones I still have on disk.
The problem is, I typed them up back in the late 80’s when I lived in NH and didn’t do much most nights.
Now, I can’t read the files. I think I was using either MacWrite or MacWrite II at the time. It was my old Mac Plus. Some of it even before I had a hard drive for it. Some of on that huge 20 meg drive I got for it in 89.
I’ve found a program that says it does MacWrite II files, but it’s $80 and I don’t want to spend that if it won’t work. And, it clearly says it won’t work on regular MacWrite.

I know my friends list doesn’t have a lot of Mac types, but a few of you are. Any clue on how to extract that data?

Comments

[malterre.livejournal.com]

The red mac I believe has a maclink-a translation program

[fbhjr.livejournal.com]

I'll try it tonight.
Thank you.

[evrgreen.livejournal.com]

Well, we still have an old Performa460 I think in the back of a closet - it probably still runs, though I don't currently know where the keyboard is for it. IF you still have stuff on floppy disks, that might work..

[fbhjr.livejournal.com]

No, it's on a CD. Sad.

[yebo.livejournal.com]

If you can actually *read* the files, I may be able to extract the text. You'd lose the formatting, but most of the data should be there. MacWrite was a pretty simple format.

A couple of summers ago I finally threw away the 300 BPI 9-track tape with all my college files from the DEC-20.

[fbhjr.livejournal.com]

I can open them, but they seem like random characters.
I got the old Powerbook 230 (from 1994) going and on them the files are compressed with Disk Doubler. So, that may be adding to the issue.
I downloaded un-stuffit, that says it can do DD files, but that didn't work either.
Sad.