Reader won't open old PDFs

Question

I have an old CD from 1994 that I purchased way back then and the modern Adobe Reader 9 will not read the files.
When the new reader opens the files they are full of Control Characters instead of graphics and text.
I still have an old PC with Windows ME (yeah, you read that right) and Acrobat Reader 3.0 that reads the files fine, so I know the CD is not corrupt. But I really don't want to keep that hunk of junk PC around just to read this CD. I suppose I could uninstall Acrobat and install the old version, but that would stink..
Is there a converter to make these files readable on a "real" computer?

Answer 1

Hello, Lroux:
I have tried every way I can imagine to open the sample document you posted. I have tried a multitude of open source PDF readers/creators/converters as well as Web-based tools for such to no avail. Reader 3.0.1 which I installed on one of my test boxes will in fact open the first page of the document, but the font appears as it was done with an extremely shaky hand and no other pages of the document will display.
The way I see it, you have a couple options. You could install the trial version of Acrobat which works for 30 days. Included with that is a PDF document printer which you should be able to use to "print" to from Reader 3.0. Personally, I would be concerned that once Acrobat was installed, the document would no longer display properly in Reader 3.0 but it's possible it will work as expected.
If it was me and I wanted to have access to the files in question on the CD, I would:
1. Search the manufacturer's Website for copies of the documents in question and save them to my system for safe keeping.
2. If the documents are not available online, I would install Microsoft's XPS Document Writer (MS's version of PDF). Using the XPS doc writer as your printer, "print" the documents which will save them as a XPS document (proprietary image format). You would lose the ability to copy/search text but you would at the very least have all the information within the documents and wouldn't have to keep that beast around just to have access to the documents in question.
RE: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/viewxps.mspx
I hope this helps!
     Michael