Thoughts on Taking Inventory

For documentation, you could start with standard bibliographic categories and add as any qualifiers you want to specialize it to computers. For hardware, I started an inventory database a year or two ago for my PDP-11 stuff. I have a relational database with several tables. This is specific to one type of computer, but you could generalize it without too much trouble. One table contains all the information in the "PDP-11 Field Guide" with the DEC Module ID as the key. I have updated this with corrected information and 3rd party vendor information as I come across it. Another table contains the actual modules I have (or had). A foreign key in this table links to the module type table. A similar set of tables applies to "components", which is basically everything except modules. Rather than try to show containment of modules by components or components by components, the structure of something bigger than a module is just the sum of all the components and modules. Since some of the components and modules are in systems, a final table describes a system. Altogether, it looks like this (the dashed lines are the relationships between the tables in the database): Modules (Field Guide) ======= Module Type Serial Number (key) =========== Module ID -M----------1- Module ID (key) --M- Name Option ID / Source Bus / Status Description Systems / Comment ======= / Name (key) -1-- Type \ Components Serial Number \ ========== Component Type Comment \ Serial Number (key) ============== \ Component ID -M-------1- Component ID (key) --M- Name Option ID Source Bus Comment Type Description This makes it real easy to generate all sort of "reports" on just selected Types, Modules/Components of selected type, status, etc., complete systems--whatever you need. I plan to have selected subsets of this available online at my Web site in a month or two. In fact I was thinking of setting up something like what Kevin suggests, but specialize in just PDP-11 stuff. It would be called QUEUE: Q-bus and Unibus Equipment Users Exchange. If Kevin beats me to it, ... well that saves me a lot of trouble! By the way, the PDP-11 Field Guide has been maintained by Ron Copley, but I haven't heard from him for months/years. I highly recommend that the PDP-11 Field Guide be maintained as a table like above to make it easier to update and use. It's always easy to export the table to some sort of delimited ASCII file (commas, tabs, etc.) to make it usable by someone who doesn't want to use a database. Or to generate a report that reconstructs something real close to the current listing. Dave Kevin McQuiggin wrote: