I recently grabbed a 486 computer from my parents house and in the process of finding my old dos/windows software to install on the machine I found a backup file for a TI-82 software and wondered if it contained anything that I wrote in my youth.
The first thing I discovered is that there are no tools for working with these files in modern windows. I also discovered that even on windows 3.11 with the old software designed to use these files you could not open a backup on the PC. The only solution was to head out to ebay and buy a TI-82 calculator and a serial cable for connecting it to the pc.
Finally I was able to connect the calculator to the computer, restore the backup, and then extract the program files one by one. Everything was wonderful, except for the fact that converting the files to ASCII one by one in the gui was just too slow for the number of files I had. The last piece of the puzzle was finding a command line program, written for old dos, that was capable of converting the files as a batch.
Now that I have these files available the plan is to post them to the blog for sharing with the world.