First the file's corrupt or not status: It works for me when I download it:
toad:/home/hennes>wget www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~ndm/PhDthesis.ps.gz --2016-02-26 07:57:37-- http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~ndm/PhDthesis.ps.gz Resolving www.robots.ox.ac.uk (www.robots.ox.ac.uk)... 129.67.94.2 Connecting to www.robots.ox.ac.uk (www.robots.ox.ac.uk)|129.67.94.2|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 3369790 (3.2M) [application/x-gzip] Saving to: `PhDthesis.ps.gz' 100%[======================================>] 3,369,790 8.83M/s in 0.4s 2016-02-26 07:57:38 (8.83 MB/s) - `PhDthesis.ps.gz' saved [3369790/3369790]
Donwloaded via wget. Notice that it recognises the file as being gzipped ([application/x-gzip]). To save bandwidth many webservers serve gzip compressed information and many browsers can decompress this on the fly.
This means that one some browsers you can download a file.gz and when you save it is already decompressed. The file name does not always get adjusted for this.
Lets see what file thinks of the downloaded result:
toad:/home/hennes>file PhDthesis.ps.gz PhDthesis.ps.gz: gzip compressed data, was "thesis.ps", from Unix, last modified: Wed May 19 20:15:48 1999
If it is a gzip file I should be able to uncompress it: toad:/home/hennes>gzip -d PhDthesis.ps.gz
No errors reported.
Rerunning file in the uncompressed result:
toad:/home/hennes>file PhDthesis.ps PhDthesis.ps: PostScript document text conforming at level 2.0 Looks like correct postscript to me. One final check, opening it in a text editor:
Postscript al right. And even showing the traditional TeX to DVI to PS path. Classic.
Secondly, how to open it:
The classical way would be in ghostview, but there are many programs which should be able to handle postscript files. gs is probably installed on most unix like systems. If it is windows than see this answer for ePS files.