Microfiche scanning

Benj wrote: You have the source listings - that is to say, the .LIS files produced by the compilers and assemblers as VAX/VMS was being built. It is (usually) possible to go backwards from source listing to source (although there are some restrictions). You certainly have enough there to completely understand almost all of VAX/VMS (some very select bits, like the licencing portion of LOGINOUT were deliberately excised). VAX/VMS always (in my experience) included the source listings fiche as part of the basic licence fee. So there would have been a fair number of copies of these fiche (and the associated updates) floating around. No idea how many have survived to date though. Someone in VMS Engineering was going to go back over old archive tapes and get as near a complete set of listings as possible gathered up and onto CD-ROM 9or CD-R). I'm no longer in a position to know how well that effort is going, and I doubt that such listings will be released for some time, if ever. Fiche is reputed to last for quite some time (barring obvious physical damage) so I would not worry about it degrading any time soon. OTOH, if you are concerned about having to safeguard this fiche, I'd be more than happy to relieve you of the burden, I'd even pay shipping :-) I promise you that it would be very happy sitting with the V3.4 - V4.6 (ish) sets that I already have. FWIW: Sometime in the V5 timeframe, the fiche distribution obviuously became sufficiently burdensome that DEC stopped offering it as part of the licence fee, although it was available as an extra cost option. That's the point at which my company stopped taking it and my fiche stopped. At about the same time, source listings moved over to being distributed on CDROM, which made them considerably more useful (SEARCH works much better there than it does on fiche!!). Antonio -- --------------- Antonio Carlini arcarlini at iee.org