The PICT format? -- and PICTs in Illustrator?

I have numerous PICTs that were created a couple of decades ago. When I
open one of these today using Illustrator CS, I see a small postage
stamp size cc of the image positioned about one artboard's width and
height up to the left from the upper left corner of the artboard (I
assume it's the artboard -- a black rectangle, anyway).

If I Select All, or drag over a larger area I see a kind of much larger
but incomplete version of the image that's maybe three times the size of
the artboard and centered on it, and seems to contain a lot of the
points and symbols of the artboard, but not the lines.

If I expand the Illustrator magnification to large value and look at one
of those points close up, it's often what seems to be clearly a vector
format graphic, e.g. of an arrowhead with endpoints and lines, or a
circle with Bezier curve type handles which one can in fact adjust with
the mouse and change the shape of the small object.

If I Save As the graphic from Illustrator to, say, PDF or EPS, I get
what seems to be only a raster or pixel graphic.

What goes on here? I thought I once was told that PICT format contained
vector *and* raster data. A year ago I was sternly informed that PICT
graphics were strictly pixel data. Now I'm just confused -- and on the
practical side, what would be the best choice and procedure for
converting all these old PICTs into some other more modern or widely
used format, if I just want to get out of the business of handling them?

[comp.text.pdf added because I'd suppose there are some graphics formats
experts on that grup.]

> What goes on here? I thought I once was told that PICT format contained
> vector *and* raster data. A year ago I was sternly informed that PICT
> graphics were strictly pixel data. Now I'm just confused -- and on the
> practical side, what would be the best choice and procedure for
> converting all these old PICTs into some other more modern or widely
> used format, if I just want to get out of the business of handling them?

QuickTime Player seems to open PICT files on my machine. So if you
have QuickTime Pro, this is probably the easiest way of converting
them to a modern format (PDF or so). Also, since after all Apple
invented that format, the converted file should contain as much info
as there was in the original file, so if turns out to be a low-
resolution bitmap, that's probably just what the files are...

Martin