I tried to open in MS Word, first I got a (file conversion) window, with 3 options of the text encoding: 1- Windows (default), 2- MS-DOS, 3- other encoding.
I chosed other eoncoding and I only got a set of small squares as a disply.
Strange behaviour. I tried to open an old Nisus Writer Classic document from within MS Word 2004 and it worked. I got one or two squares, but everything else was readable. Word did not ask anything about the text coding.
In what language (or -s) are the documents written in?