Extracting old data from a DOS software

Question

I have an old software created on DOS. All I have is an executable which shows me the UI. What this software does is it takes details of an order given to a door manufacturing company, stores it somewhere and sends the data to a needle printer. The data stored includes things like the name and address of the customer, door dimensions and so on.

The original creators of the software are no longer reachable and I have no idea what language was used to create it. My company wishes to get rid of this system but right now the only way to access information about old orders is by inserting the order number into the UI.

What I need to do is extract this data and convert it to some readable format, I have read research papers, searched this website and many others but have come up empty. I know that when I enter a new order the files that get modified have the following formats:

^01, WRK, DBK, STA

There are other files in the directory with formats like .ALT, .DBI, .ASC, .BAS, .DDF, .MA3 but those dont seem to have changed in the last 20 years.

Thank you very much in advance guys

Answer 1

The file extensions aren't always the best way of finding out things. File extensions are fluid and there's never been much in the way of standardisation, or at least not back in the DOS days. If you look at FilExt, for example, there's a fair bit of double up.

You'd be better off running the files through a tool like TrID/32 - File Identifier v2.10 - (C) 2003-11 By M.Pontello which does a good job of recognising files by their content rather than their file extension. It's not foolproof but can identify a few thousand different file types.

I used to do a lot of development on DOS back in the day. If you want to contact me off list, bruce dot axtens at gmail dot com, I can help identify the files and perhaps cook up a mechanism to extract the data.