I also have an archive, dating back to 1995, from Adept 5.0 through 9.0.
All the archives include the SGML source files, DTD and FOSIs, graphics
and any ACL files, for each document. We also have Postscript and PDF
versions of all published documents, so our only need for the SGML
source would be if an revision needed to be published.
It's been a couple of years now since I 'exercised' any of these
archived documents. On Solaris, using Epic 4.3.1, the documents could
be opened in context, although improvements in the parsing of the DTD
did highlight some problematic content models. FOSIs of course were a
different story, none of the pre-Adept 8 FOSIs are compatible without
being converted. Since I was only running the exercise as a point of
interest, I never went to the trouble of converting one.
Most of our documents have had a very consistent structure and the
changes that have happened over the past 14 years mostly involve
extensions to the structure and new composition formats and features.
Just in the last two weeks the possibility of resurrecting 4 documents,
originally published in 1997, has been raised by our technical authors.
However these would be published in the current format and so the 1997
source only needs to be transformed to match the present DTD before it
can be used.
As far as running Adept on Windows XP or Vista, they both have a
Compatibility Mode that allows old programs to 'run' as if on older
Windows versions (back to Windows 95). It would be interesting to see
if this would work - if only there was more time to play!
Cheers,
David
David S. Taylor
Project Manager, Structured Information
Institute for Research in Construction
National Research Council Canada
Bldg. M-23A, Room 239
1200 Montreal Road, Ottawa, ON K1A 0R6