On Thu, 2005-04-21 at 15:50 -0700, Vintage Computer Festival wrote: Bloody hell, you beat me to it, grr! :-)

On Thu, 21 Apr 2005, John Allain wrote: Hmmmm Howzbout the toy microscope that intel sold?

Anybody with a removable lens camera could do this. A real microscope is desirable because of the good illuminator. The camera needs at least 4MP for 1 page at 200 dpi. John A.

Tom wrote: [...] Because if Alice has fiche in a clean dry dark place, that doesn't necessarily help Bob. But if Alice's fiche is scanned and put on a web site, it may help everyone. Presumably almost all of it did at one time, the exception being some diagnostic listings in later years that were directly to COM. But a lot of it was never distributed to customers (or field service) on paper. And a huge amount of the stuff that was available on paper is impossible to find on paper now. And even if it was on paper, it would *still* be more useful scanned than sitting on someone's shelf. When was the last time you saw the IPB (Illustrated Parts Breakdown) for a PDP-11T55? Or the wirelist for the KB11-D backplane? I've never seen either. The former was probably available on paper at one time, but I doubt that anyone has a paper copy now. The latter was never available on paper. Yet both should be in the PDP-11 fiche set. Eric

Patrick Finnegan wrote: Moreso, you can't SEARCH fiche. I am converting all of my documentation, misc. pages, etc. into PDF or ASCII text so that they can be indexed and searched. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Want to help an ambitious games project? http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/

On Fri, 22 Apr 2005 01:02:14 -0500 Patrick Finnegan <pat at computer-refuge.org> wrote: Actually, when I worked at a COM shop, I tried duplicating some Tektronix Scope manuals that I had on fiche. Generally fiche are 'shot' to silver film, which has less stability, but then 'published' to diazo media which is very stable and long-lived. What I did was take the diazo 'duplicates' that I bought from Tektronix, and laid them emulsion-to-emulsion on the diazo fiche 'duplicator' that every COM shop used to have, and which are probably still in production. It produced nice and quite readable duplicates. Not as good as the original, but very legible. If we want to 'make the information widely available' one approach would be to find a micrografix shop somewhere still in operation and have duplicate sets made. Back in the days of mainstream COM duplicate fiche cost under a few cents apiece to produce. The cost for hand-placed dupes would probably be higher, but the material cost for high quality diazo media on polyester is fairly inexpensive. Another alternative would be to make silver-film dupes, which would simply involve contact printing from fiche to 105mm silver film. That wouldn't require much 'equipment' at all that is any more specialized than a darkroom and a contact print frame. Granted, these approaches still leaves people with fiche to strain their eyes over, but it's a VERY viable solution and single or limited-source technical archives could VERY easily be widely duplicated by this means.

On Thu, 2005-04-21 at 21:41 -0700, Tom Jennings wrote: As Eric said (so eloquently!), it's more a case of fiche making it harder to make the docs available to others. We've *probably* got everything in paper format as well as fiche (if not more) - but it'd be nice if we could make what we have available to others and fill some gaps in what's available online. I was hoping that there would be an easy way of scanning lots of fiche (as it's not in bound format which lends itself toward being fed unattended through a device) but it seems not (at least not without Al's gadget :-) cheers Jules

The VMS listings switched from fiche to CD when the fiche had grown to nearly two boxes per release. AFAICT the CD source listings kit has the same stuff that went into the fiche: the .LST files. There was a source kit, from which you could produce your own VMS, but I believe that rather than being a $1K/annum subscription, it was a $200K per release cost. I don't know when the last one was done, but I do remember someone with Engineering saying that they'll do another one when someone actually asks. I don't know if all layered product groups used fiche as an archival medium, but I know that PSI, DECnet-RSX and ALL-IN-1 did on at least some oocasions. Just as well really, because I'm willing to bet that most of the archived source tapes have ended up in the bit-bucker. I remember hearing (probably via Bob Supnik) that DEC had a big clear out of the archives that they were paying someone (Iron Mountain?) to maintain. Pity really, as I'd bet that the entirety of the sources (and build tools etc.) for everything up to and including the PDP-11 would have fit on a single CD, or at most, a single DVD. Antonio -- --------------- Antonio Carlini arcarlini at iee.org

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