You made some good suggestions, and what I write below may look as if I'm criticizing your techniques. I'm not critcizing your techniques - they're about as good as they come! - but I am criticizing how various phenomena on the web put people off of finding appropriate resources. Unfortunately, many of the best classic archives have "dropped off" the responses of most search engines. For instance, at one point in time all of the DECUS indices I maintain at http://metalab.unc.edu/pub/academic/computer-science/history/pdp-11/decus/ were tracked by Altavista and other major search engines. In the past six months, though, they've all dropped off. Why? I think it has to do with the trend for search engine designers to think that "if it's old, it's not relevant", and in the web-world 6-months old is *old*. Anyone seen the HotBot ads? If your web page is a few months old, they rank you with the geezers! With the increasing trend toward more glitzy web sites, I'm afraid that an archive 20 or 30-year old text, source code, and assembler source is going to get even fewer hits by many modern search engines. This, actually, is pretty good, if you find the right responses. Many Usenet responses, though, are of the form "see the FAQ" or "see the <name but not URL goes here> archive", and a newbie won't know how to find what the respondent is talking about. (This applies to this mailing list here, too, BTW. There's a common reliance on internal resources instead of pointing folks toward resources maintained by folks off-list.) Sure, this works quite well if you're already "in the know" enough to know where to ask. I'm mainly concerned about folks who don't know where to start. What I would really, really like to see is for places like eBay or Amazon or Haggle maintain references to items they don't offer for sale. Of course, there's zero commercial incentive for them to do so. Again, a wonderful resource for those already in the know! Though if we're lucky some of the media coverage of the VCF events will actually contain useful links to this mailing list and other resources. This is a *very* excellent suggestion! Maybe I can help make it happen. I can put together a glitzy postscript file (hey, I'm getting pretty good at page layout in writing postscript by hand these days) with good PDP-11/DEC resources listed on it. Again, I'm putting my emphasis not necessarily on collectors, but on people who continue to use classic computers. I, myself, am not particularly impressed by websites that are just pictures of someone's computer collection and talk about these machines as relics from the past or museum items. But I *am* impressed by folks who continue to actively develop for older platforms, and want to let the wider world know what's available today. -- Tim Shoppa Email: shoppa(a)trailing-edge.com Trailing Edge Technology WWW: http://www.trailing-edge.com/ 7328 Bradley Blvd Voice: 301-767-5917 Bethesda, MD, USA 20817 Fax: 301-767-5927