DEC colours

Gosh, will this thread never die? Well, it's been interesting if overlong. Properly administered paint doesn't allow transmission to the layer beneath it. . . . A conclusion seems to be that color perception (human or machine) is not mathematically rigorous with respect to a true chromatograph of a thing, and this spins out to complexity. Meanwhile somebody in, say, L.A. wants the color of someone's PDP-5 in Indiana. I think unscrewing panels and taking them to Lowe's is better than nothing, but that gets involved with some pretty uncalibrated machinery and untrained individuals. And what if Guy#2 doesn't have a Lowes, etc. Guess I'm just partial to what NASA does. Throw down a few reference colors next to the thing, take a color photograph, and postprocess the reference colors to what they should be. Although now I see that that is like the problem of describing right and left to an alien. Where do you get the reference colors in the first place? Guess one of us has to find a vendor for the three swatches to mail to requesting parties. John A.