There's no magic - you just have to have an extreme dedication to storing the original information - in its entirety - in an archivable form. This means, usually, reducing every piece of input medium into a "stream of bytes" file that will be portable through operating systems (such as Unix) which don't have an innate concept of "records". For 9-track and 7-track tapes, I prefer "TPC images", as made by many of the TPC archiving programs available for DEC OS's. A TPC image of a tape allows you to exactly reproduce the tape again later records in the file. See http://pdp-10.trailing-edge.com/ to see how I applied this to the PDP-10 software archives, and for pointers on the web to the many TPC tools available. After you make a TPC file, it's important to preserve the record lengths in the file before you transfer the file to a machine that doesn't know about records. For this, my preferred method is ZIP "-V" on VMS, where the "-V" qualifier makes sure that the file attributes and record lengths are all stored in the Zip file. Then you can move the file to Unix's and PC's which don't know anything about record lengths, because the Zip file *is* a stream of bytes. For block-oriented disk (and block-oriented tapes, like DECtape I and II) devices, the preferred archival method is a block-by-block image of everything on the original. This is easily done by, for example, COPY/DEV/FILE DEV: FILE.NAM under RT-11, or by doing a MOUNT/FOR of the disk device under VMS and then COPY DEV: FILE.NAM. Under recent versions of RSX-11M you can use the VCP (Virtual configuration program) and the VD: drivers to make block-by-block copies of disks into container files. Whenever possible, do COPY/VERIFY operations followed by a DIFF/BIN to make sure your copy is exactly the same as the original (and that it's readable, too!) DECNET is fine, if the machine's you're putting together support it nicely. Don't discount the effort it takes to get a PDP-11 properly configured and the peripherals running - sometimes I'm sure you'll get lucky and it'll just work when you plug it in, but when stuff is coming in "unknown" or "not used for many years" condition, it can take time to get everything going happily. Finally, it's really quite easy to get a PDP-11 running RT-11 hooked up and running TCP/IP, so don't waste too much time dinking around with DECNET. Just for some perspective, I've been building the PDP-11 DECUS and freeware archives for over a decade now. It's not that reading any particular medium is slow (I can image several gigabytes of 9-tracks a day while doing other "real" work), but tracking down the material, getting it into my hands (even when I supply my Fedex account number to get it here at no cost to the donator) and indexing and organizing the results is *not* a quick process. If you've any doubts about the mechanical condition of any of your drives, by all means play it slow and don't risk one-of-a-kind media in a drive with questionable heads. And for paper tapes, if you're concerned about mechanical fragility of the tape, find yourself a gentle slow optical reader (like the DEC PR/S01) and don't risk the tape to some insanely high-speed reader (which *will* occasionally jam up and crinkle your tape, even if you keep it properly adjusted.) The name of the game is to preserve and archive for the next 100 years or so, not to rush to get something that isn't as good as the original! If you're going to be archiving DEC OS distributions, you might want to ask me to get you a list of what I've got archived here already. The archive here doesn't go back forever, but I have copies of most versions from the early-mid-80's onward. (i.e. RSTS/E V7 and on, RT-11 V4 and forward with some earlier V3 And V2 distributions, RSX-11M 3.0 forward, and RSX-11M+ V2.0 and forward, with many of the layered product kits thrown in for good measure.) -- 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