Have old Illustrator files from 1993 I would like to open but cannot

I did discover that some of the files are not Illustrator but are Freehand. I opened the EXEC files in Text Edit and the first line said "FH31". I did a search and found a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dH7k00nO2Y) that showed you can open these files in Scribus, and after adding a ".fh3" to the end of the file, I did get some open in Scribus. But it's hit and miss how accurate these files will be rendered.

So there's a partial answer to my old files. I appear to have a mixture of Illustrator files with more Freehand files than I thought I had. The Illustrator files appear to be the "SimpleText" files that have the ability to be opened when ".eps" is tacked on. The other EXEC files are more likely to be Freehand and will be a roll of the dice with what's salvagable and how Scribus interprets them, which is what the video says can happen.

Thanks for all the answers so far. Like I said, I've been able to open some but not all, pending what form they were in. 

Monica, oh man, I had forgotten about DiskDoubler. That's right, back in the day when I was running on a Mac with a 40mb hard drive (!) and needed to save space working on all that small media, making my files fit on Zip drives for backup! Yikes. 

I do have some files labelled as Freehand but in that period I mostly worked with Illustrator. I have a bunch of QuarkXPress files in there, too that are also EXEC files, so I bet that's what happened... I must have DiskDoubled a number of them, and those files are probably no longer going to be accessible unless there's some way to run them to remove that "fault". 

1993 was the good old days of DiskDoubler, a compression application.

Maybe those files have been given the treat.

Also: maybe they are just corrupted. Happened so easily back then. 

But also: maybe they are not Illustrator files, but FreeHand? If they are indee FreeHand 5 files (or anything older than 7), then you will need the help of these folks: tensai.co.uk) Or someone who still has an old FreeHand version and an old Illustrator version that still has the FH opener engine.

I have no problems opening files from that time, they are PostScript text files.

In your example I see that the name contains a comma, what happens if you rename the file to test.ai?

The exec files could have been corrupted or compressed with an app like Stuffit.

Since you mentioned Illustrator 5.5 I assume these are old Mac OS encoded files you're trying to open. In the early 1990's the MacOS went from the Motorola 040 code base to PowerPC. OSX didn't debut until 1999. I'm a PC guy, but I can't help but wonder if there could be some sort of file encoding issue from earlier versions of the MacOS the current version of Illustrator doesn't understand.

I don't think so. Before version 7 files were noct cross-version compatible which basicalyl means you really need those old programs to open them again. Unless there is soem obscure extension to GhostScript or other such tools I think this is not going to go anywhere if you don't have "clean" distilled PS files or PDFs.

Mylenium