Looking for opinions...

[Ethan Dicks]

On Wed, Mar 28, 2018 at 12:59 PM, Al Kossow via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> The rock has been lifted (again)
>
> DOES ANYONE READ OLD POSTS HERE??????

Some of us...

> Do the math. Scanning all of that fiche is man-centuries of work with all but the most expensive equipment.

Quite.  Maybe someday 9600 dpi scan heads will be cheap, but not soon
enough for most of us here today to care.

> That's why it hasn't been done.

Indeed.

I too have a quantity of fiche - some IBM from the 1980s and lots of
DEC (70s and 80s hardware - mostly Qbus and Unibus but some VMS
source).  I doubt I have anything unique, but it's possible a handful
of items are not easily found.

For myself, it would be an enormous accomplishment just to make an
index of the titles.  At least it fits in a couple of shoeboxes and
takes up less room than paper.   The manual fiche reader itself is
much larger than my pile of fiche, so there's that.

-ethan