I've run into similar issues with many of my old campaign articles: they're all on 5.25" floppies formatted to a Commodore 128 word processing program that I forget the name of. In my case, I have printouts of most of the content, probably, so I'm a bit less concerned, but I would still like to inventory and transfer the floppies sometime....
I'm glad to hear that Gary's found this ms., and hope you'll find other lost goodies as well. Is there a chance that there's anything interesting from NIPI on those CDs?