Hi,
I had to dig out some ancient drawings (HPGL, gerber set) late last night. Of course, the originals from which they were created are not readable by anything "modern" (but, then again, this is probably true for many things from 2009!).
Thankfully, I have kept all tools and suitable hardware to run those tools on so that I can recover these sorts of things.
But, it begs the question: what is the tool-du-jour for reading/viewing/printing/converting *common* >>>OUTPUT
For documents, LibreOffice (which is a fork of OpenOffice by some of the original OO developers) has a very good collection of legacy format filters. Its better (in my experience) at reading old Microsoft files than the official Microsoft converter. It even copes with WordPerfect files.
For Gerbers, a very good free viewer is GC-Prevue. Another is Pentalogix ViewMate. I have used both. If you want to edit the Gerbers, both are available in paid-for versions which allow edits to be saved.
John
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