so i have a 20-year-old drawing file i wanted to look at today. but i didn't recognize the file extension (axd) and there was no file association. what to do? 
maybe a google search? nope, no right answers on the first page. or the second page. in fact, the results are flooded with websites claiming to decode file extensions.
i think my favorite description so far is "AXD files are typically a type of binary file used by certain software, and many software packages can share a common file extension. In the case of files..."
ok, so i added a bunch of search terms and it turns out it is the drawing file format used by a product called Actrix. naturally, as a failed Autodesk product, it's a proprietary binary format. they never released a translator or a spec.
oh no, OLE automation. this is some sort of cursed Windows C++ OLE automation serialized object nonsense.
wait that gives me an idea, this reminds me vaguely of what Altium did with their file format.
sure enough, 7zip can open it! that means it is a Windows Compound File Binary Format.
Time @tubetime@mastodon.socialso i think it would be easier to track down a copy of the software and install it on an old PC, then save it as some other format, rather than trying to reverse engineer this mountain of binary garbage.
there are three lessons here:
1. internet search has been made nearly completely useless by SEO spam and autogenerated websites.
2. never trust proprietary software. use open source software or software that generates human readable files.
3. maybe print out your important documents
@tubetime It's also not helped by search engines being manic about guessing what you really meant, rather than ever believing you might want to find _exactly_ what you searched for.
@tubetime so … how has your list changed in the 20+ years since Actrix was first released?
@tubetime
I'm pretty sure I can still open the papers I wrote in Abiword as an English major 20 years ago... I should check that and maybe convert them to rtf.
@literatesavant Actually, RTF is a pretty ugly format. Consider something like the OpenOffice document format, or if you can, plain text. Even HTML and PDF will likely stay with us longer than RTF.
@riley
Oh, I always thought RTF was an open standard, but I see that it's not really. Good to know.
@literatesavant It's only "open" in the sense that Microsoft published a spec and pushed it through a "process", but it's a really ugly format, and the spec is so ambiguous and buggy that it is only of limited use in reverse engineering the format. RTF is not a future-proof format. Even PDF is better than RTF, as preservation goes, and PDF is a pretty sucky idea to begin with.
@riley
ProText in PC from the early '90s can open ProText files from the 1980s and save them in RTFs still readable today, so I thought they hadn't changed that much?
@literatesavant @tubetime
@tubetime
Perhaps the shareware installer contained in this bin file will help?
https://archive.org/details/computer200006cd
I'd probably run this in a VM since its possible that it could have some unsavory additions...
@computerywar @tubetime Hahaha! I just may have found that too and loaded it into a DOSBox-X Win98 image.
@computerywar @tubetime Sad result when I try to open any of the sample .AXD documents 
@tubetime If you can believe it, the trial is working! Only usable for 30 days from 4/20/99 though :(
I had to reinstall the program over itself 3 times and set the date back on each restart.
Pour one out for all the RealPlayer files that people saved from Web 1.0.
also at some point in my life I became quite an archiving maniac and storing everything also in pdf, csv, png, jpg etc
@tubetime I would say that more than proprietary software the problem is the proprietary file format.
@tubetime I found this dude that has a copy and was willing to translate files you e-mail him, lol. https://www.worldcadaccess.com/blog/2015/11/got-axd-files-we-got-actrix-2000-for-translation.html
@tubetime If you don’t mind e-mailing your AXD files to someone named Ralph Grabowski, they’ll get converted to DWGs and sent back to you: https://www.worldcadaccess.com/blog/2015/11/got-axd-files-we-got-actrix-2000-for-translation.html
@tubetime That's probably the best thing to do.
What I have learned from my old files: Don't try to store in other formats. You may lose data of that proprietary software, like vector graphics convert to a jpg. But keep the software you used. If you need it later, you can always run that old software in a VM and edit or export what you need.