Photographing fiche (Was: DEC RD53 Manual

I wrote: Except for those that probably never did :-) For a start, diagnostics and source listings probably never existed on paper, although both would have existed as electronic copies. Diagnostics will have been available via the fiche libraries (I have a blue metal box with the FS VAX Diagnostic Listings, there will have been other libraries for minis and LCG at least). That's a huge a mount of stuff but hoepfully a fair chunk will have survived. Source listings for VMS were distributed with the OS until the V4.4 days (or thereabouts). I expect that amassing a complete set wouldn't be that hard. After that they transitioned to CD and there will be plenty of copies lying about. Source listings for other Oss may have been routinely distributed, but I don't know. (The Unix products may be a special case where this might not have been possible). Internally to DEC at least some products used to produce source listings on microfiche. There would typically have been only a few copies of those, so survival depends on how much of a packrat the group librarian might have been or how near someone might have been to the appropriate dumpster. Antonio arcarlini at iee.org