Now that it is the weekend, I've had a chance to try again the simplest 
solution Jay suggested for the Haldeman CD for which I can only access the two .DAT 
files on my old computer.  

Earlier in the week, as Jay suggested, I tried setting up a Generic/Text only 
on FILE printer option on my old Win98 first edition computer.  Although the 
Haldeman CD help file actually describes a "Printing to File" option, it does 
not address assigning a file name or type.  When I looked at the dropdown menu 
for Print to File with a Generic/Text only FILE, it only gave the choice of 
selecting .prn extention files.  (I don't know why it does not give a TXT 
extension option in the drop down menu when you check that you want to print to 
file.)  Not what I needed, obviously.

This morning, when I actually had time to work with this on my old computer, 
I decided to bypass the drop down menu for file type and simply to type in an 
assigned title of my own to direct it to save (print to file) the displayed 
diary entry as an ASCHII file.  I used HRH021870.txt for the February 18, 1970.  
Success!  It saved it to my hard drive as a text file, which I am now able to 
access via Word, WordPerfect, and Wordpad on my old computer.  Hooray!

Although I lose the nice embedded links to photo images and bio info that are 
on the original CD, at least I now can save onto my old computer (the only 
one that will enable me to open up the entires) the individual diary entries 
that are in the two .DAT files on the CD.  I can then create large electronic 
files in Word etc. and then transfer the info via flash drive to my new compuer.  
(The USB on my old computer from 1997 only recognizes the smaller flash 
drives, with 128 megs, but hey, at least it does enable me to use some kind of 
flash drive.)  And I then will be able search electronically (Steve would approve) 
rather than just printing out the stuff to paper.  It still will take time to 
bring up each diary entry and to print to FILE .  While I can't do a global 
dump of the info, at least I can create electronic records of them.

Looking at the splashscreen, it seems to me the access problem may be caused 
by the fact that as soon as the Diaries start to load, the first thing you see 
is moving images showing a few seconds of several of Haldeman's old movies.  
Since the Quicktime 1.1.1.1 interface with the data files doesn't work on 
newer computers, the present day researcher immediately encounters the "create 
window failure" error notice and is shut out of access to the table of contents.  
Too fancy an approach by Sony in 1994 turned out to work against them.  A 
simpler solution, which did not immediately force use of Quicktime in order to 
get to the table of contents, would have been better, in retrospect!

Thanks to all of you who have the patience to read through my many long 
messages here (obviously, as the sole historian at GAO, I'm somewhat like the "lone 
arrangers" they joke about on the Archives List).  I posted my Haldeman CD 
quandary first to this list and then to the Archives list because I thought I 
was most likely to find some good technological solutions on Recmgmt-L.  And you 
didn't let me down!  Kudos to Jay et al.

Have a good weekend, all!

Maarja

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