21 Apr
2005
21 Apr
'05
10:35 p.m.
Tom wrote:
Sheesh, why is everyone treating fiche as a horrible
thing? Like
it's some terrible, embarrassing obsolete medium that needs to be
converted out of as quickly as possible?
Fiche is great. Keep in clean and dry in a dark place and it will
last for hundreds of years.
[...]
Not everything need exist inside a computer.
Because if Alice has fiche in a clean dry dark place, that doesn't
necessarily help Bob. But if Alice's fiche is scanned and put on a web
site, it may help everyone.
Besides, I doubt there's many pages on fiche that
don't already
exist on paper.
Presumably almost all of it did at one time, the exception being some
diagnostic listings in later years that were directly to COM. But a
lot of it was never distributed to customers (or field service) on
paper. And a huge amount of the stuff that was available on paper
is impossible to find on paper now. And even if it was on paper, it
would *still* be more useful scanned than sitting on someone's shelf.
When was the last time you saw the IPB (Illustrated Parts Breakdown)
for a PDP-11T55? Or the wirelist for the KB11-D backplane? I've never
seen either. The former was probably available on paper at one time, but
I doubt that anyone has a paper copy now. The latter was never available
on paper. Yet both should be in the PDP-11 fiche set.
Eric