The answer is: Mekel 460XL Microfiche scanner

From: Antonio Carlini <Antonio.Carlini_at_riverstonenet.com>
Date: Thu May 9 03:31:36 2002

>Got a pile of the VMS fishies around here somewhere, but it would be
>illegal to violate DECs copyright and trade secrets in such a fashion.
>Even worse would be to admit to planning such a violation on an
>archived mailing list.

Good to see you're likely to be around long enough
to get to operate that machine :-)

Anyway, the OpenVMS listings are available on
CD (at least from the V5.5-ish era onwards).
(And the fiche is source listings, *not* sources).

Someone from OpenVMS engineering commented
(some time ago) in comp.os.vms that he was
trying to get copies of the V1/V2/V3/V4 listings
onto CD. No word on whether these would be
made available (a la freeware) but it seems
pointless scanning something that is known
to exist electronically when there is
so much other stuff on fiche that is
not available online.

My vote is 400dpi in PDF (or TIFF, but viewers don't
seem to be so flexible for that ). Should be a nice stack
of CDs if you manage to scan 4 linear feet of fiche!

I suspect that indexing it (i.e. collecting manual#1,
manual#2, manual#3 etc. into individual files) may
well take you some time!

Can you estimate how many pages of fiche four
linear feet actually is? How many manual pages
(assuming "full" fiche sheets) does that translate
to? At 300dpi, an A4/Letter page turns out to
be maybe 50-70KB; at 600 dpi I usually find that
the PDFs turn out at 200-250KB per page. That
should allow you to roughly estimate the
amount of data you are likely to produce.

Antonio
Received on Thu May 09 2002 - 03:31:36 BST

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