It's a shame that many of the fiche-only docs once existed in magtape form and are now lost. It would've been easier and less error-prone to emulate a viewer for old page layout RUNOFF-style markup. Has there ever been an anecdote found about why all that data was tossed? -- Why is any old media tossed? The company considers it of no value. Storage space (as many of us know) is not free. If there is no chance that the information is needed for future projects or support of existing projects it is discarded. -- WRT the scanners that I have, the Mekel is a high resolution transport that can do step and repeat on all of the frames of the fiche. There is no direct display of the images on the unit, since the steping is done under computer control. I have some older 3M film/fiche scanners that are manually positioned for fiche and do automatic scanning of microfilm. The 3M units are of the type that project onto a screen and have a camera on the rear of the unit. That is the most common design for scanners under $10k. If folks in the Bay Area are interested in the 3M units, I have five available. They would probably be around $500 ea.