Microfiche scanning

John> It's a shame that many of the fiche-only docs once existed in John> magtape form and are now lost. It would've been easier and John> less error-prone to emulate a viewer for old page layout John> RUNOFF-style markup. Has there ever been an anecdote found John> about why all that data was tossed? I assume the tapes were never thought of as archival storage -- merely temporary containers to hold the bits as they were carried from the producer to the fiche printer. So there was no more reason to preserve those tapes than there is to back up /tmp. John> Fiche dominated because it was cheaper to reproduce and easier John> to view than electronic documents. It could handle hand John> drawings as well as COM. Sure. Some fiche is computer output, straight tape to fiche; others is photography of paper originals. An obvious benefit is that you could carry tens of thousands of pages in a field service toolbox. That was important back in the days when field service actually repaired things in the field (as opposed to just module swap). paul