I think the spanner in the works is that the CD-ROM bundles an MS Access runtime executable that is 16-bit and therefore will not run on 64-bit Windows. If you look in the top left of the window in the screenshot, the icon looks like Access 2.0, which was designed for 16-bit Windows.
Given, as you say, Microsoft's commitment to backwards compatibility, it is very likely in my opinion that a modern computer running 32-bit Windows 10 (not Windows 11, as they dropped the 32-bit version and therefore finally dropped 16-bit software support entirely) would run this software fine. It is also likely, as you say, that modern Access could import the underlying database (does Access 2023/365/whatever import Access 2.0 databases? Who knows! Not I, I don't touch the stuff ;)
I think their main computer being a Mac without a CD-ROM drive may be contributing elements as well. Interesting juxtaposition that they are struggling to take the files off a cd but confident they can produce a web database. But seems they found help so nice it's all ending well.
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I think the spanner in the works is that the CD-ROM bundles an MS Access runtime executable that is 16-bit and therefore will not run on 64-bit Windows. If you look in the top left of the window in the screenshot, the icon looks like Access 2.0, which was designed for 16-bit Windows.
Given, as you say, Microsoft's commitment to backwards compatibility, it is very likely in my opinion that a modern computer running 32-bit Windows 10 (not Windows 11, as they dropped the 32-bit version and therefore finally dropped 16-bit software support entirely) would run this software fine. It is also likely, as you say, that modern Access could import the underlying database (does Access 2023/365/whatever import Access 2.0 databases? Who knows! Not I, I don't touch the stuff ;)
I think their main computer being a Mac without a CD-ROM drive may be contributing elements as well. Interesting juxtaposition that they are struggling to take the files off a cd but confident they can produce a web database. But seems they found help so nice it's all ending well.