[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

One additional problem that is more than likely is that the disk itself is
hopelessly corrupted and unusable. Magnetic disks do degrade over time.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

"Tony Jollans" My forename at my surname dot com wrote in message
...
I hesitate to enter a thread full of silly arguments, but if the Word
documents were created, and password-protected by Word, in 1994 they were
obfuscated, using XOR, rather than really encrypted and, although I don't
personally know of any software that can break this, I have no doubt some
is available, and that it is a trivial task for modern PCs. I would imagine
a web search would turn up something helpful.

You may, though, have other problems with such old documents (depending
what version of Word you are currently using).

--
Enjoy,
Tony

www.WordArticles.com

"Water and Trees" wrote in
message ...
In 1994 I prepared documents saving them to 3 1/2" discs. Recently found
the
discs (there's a whole box) and would like to access them. No slot on my
current computer for them, but have a friend whose computer does still
allow
discs. My problem is wanting to by-pass the passwords I set for myself
back
in 1994.

These are basic Word documents and there may be a few WordPerfect
documents
on these discs as well. I just want to get by the passwords and get to
the
documents.

Any suggestions are appreciated!
Thanks,
--
WaterandTrees