FYI for Mac users: I can see footnotes when I look at the raw source for the RTFs, but on macOS Catalina neither TextEdit nor Pages show them.

Hmm. Perhaps someone needs to transform those RTFs to HTML, with appropriate management for the footnotes. Then we can finally have the HTML version of the annotated novel that was promised 27 years ago. :)

Good news! I got bored and spent the better part of a day doing this.

The code I used is here: https://gist.github.com/bocajnotnef/f3f43acc065a2a1a4dd433b8...

It's pretty hacky, but you end up with a single HTML file with Vinge's notes in a side margin, with numbers and everything. There's probably ways that the title bits could be improved, but I'm too lazy to fix it now that I have the actual HTML file.

Good luck! Let me know if you have questions, I may be able to help.