I have a book, "Computer Simulations with Mathematica", Gaylord & Wellin, 1995. It has a CD with text chapters in it. I downloaded the contents of the disk. But when I read a chapter into a notebook, the contents consist entirely of code for running the notebook, which I tried. This generates a typically opaque MMA error message -

Syntax::sntxf: "" cannot be followed by "(* Content-type: application/mathematica )\012\012(** Wolfram Notebook File \".

The statement is the first line in the document. However, it is NOT preceded by the double quotes, "". When I open the document with CDF (As suggested in a chat yesterday.), all I see is the same notebook commands I get when I open it in an executable form.

Is CDF the right tool to use? I tried MathReader that came on the CD, as the authors suggest, but it wouldn't run. I get a message telling me that it won't run on my computer. Is there a version of MathReader that will work? I'm running MMA 14.3 on Win 11 pro 64 bit.