28 Jun
2011
28 Jun
'11
2:41 p.m.
there are a LOT of them. PDP-10 alone is over
three feet thick. PDP-8 and PDP-11 fit into two
DEC fiche boxes (about 1 ft thick each) VAX is
bigger than PDP-10
that's not counting source listings, just manuals
and diags
A few feet from me sits a metal box with just diags fiches
(it says "VSX FS Micrfiche Library/Diagnostics Listings",
so I guess that's just diags relevant to VAX systems and their
options), so diags is huge.
There are also OS source listings and (although they were
never published AFAIK there were also source listings for
any products that chose to have such produced).
I'm guessing manuals total are about a foot but
a lot of them have been located and scanned from
paper.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that some manuals were
only ever available on fiche. Surely most diags were only
available in source form on fiche?
I'd like a list primarily so I can (relatively) quickly
find what I have (and maybe what I'm missing). The fiche
user guide explains how to keep the library up to date
by inserting new fiche and removing old fiche. So there's
plenty of scope for things to be mssing (especially if
you really want to have -001 and -002 of some manual).
42x is a real problem for resolution, esp scanning
They are what they are I'm afraid. I don't have a fiche
scanner so I'm in no position to scan anything yet. Maybe
one day (although I don't think I've seen scanned fiche
output that looks as easy on the eye as a 600dpi scan yet).
Antonio