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Digital Equipment Corporation - MicroFiche Underground

Paul,

I have only 6 mails without attachments in my folder ... space is not the problem.
It seems I can neither receive nor write PM's anymore, some problem with my account.
So let's be public: Your fiches arrived today in good conditions!

Joerg
 
Big day!

330 XXDP PDFs are ready for download now.

You can download here:
ftp://u58104846-pub:open4you@ftp.j-hoppe.de
(Note the embedded user/password strings)

The scans come in two versions: "high quality" and "black&white":

The HQ version is gray level and contains a true image of the micro fiches,
after non-destructive contrast enhancement. It is the base for further image processing.
Download path is ./fichescanner/gh/hq

The BW version is compressed to black & white and aggressively
optimized for size and letter quality. File sizes are 20x smaller than the HQ version.
Its intended for daily use and OCR, but for some very problematic fiches textual information is lost.
Download path is ./fichescanner/gh/bw

And there is a background article on
http://retrocmp.com/projects/scanning-micro-fiches
describing the self-build automatic micro fiche scanner (video!)


Enjoy!

Joerg
 
Hi,

I am urgently looking for the Diagnostic Listings for the VAX-11 computers (/780/750/730/725) which were only available on microfiche. Have you got any of those or do you know anyone who has got or might have them?

I live in Germany not far from Joerg Hoppe who did the impressive scanning of a huge number of PDP-11 Diagnostic Listings.
It might be possible to persuade him to process the VAX Diagnostic Listings as well ...

Regards,

Ulli
 
Thank you for putting these online.

There's a minor problem -- EP-DVKAH-A-DL-A__LSI-11__4K_SYSTEM_EXERCISER__MD-11-DVKAH-A__(C)1976.pdf actually contains "DZVTC-C, VT50A acceptance test"; the rest of the scans seem fine.

(I am trying to use VKA* tests to validate T11 cpu core in MAME and a listing of this test would be quite useful)
 
Micro fiche inventory online

Micro fiche inventory online

After some years, its time for another attack on these infamous DEC micro fiche libraries.

A collection with pictures of 5800+ fiches is online here now:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1-qdCf3ONeSSYhQvyv-q-qDtOdq6vXROB

Challenge is now to find the few gold grains in this pile.
Best post here if you detect something new you like to see as PDF.

Later we can plan to scan these fiches.
Earlier I used this scanning rig
http://retrocmp.com/projects/scanning-micro-fiches/235-the-homebuild-automatic-micro-fiche-scanner
to save 340 XXDP listings, now at
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp11/microfiche/ftp.j-hoppe.de/

I hope there are better ways to mass-process these fiche collections now.
If not, I'll try to put my scanner in operation again.

And if you have a box full of DEC fiches sitting somewhere, and you want to get rid of it,
sent them to me free of charge. I'll see wether I can index them too.

kind regards,
Joerg
 
After some years, its time for another attack on these infamous DEC micro fiche libraries.

A collection with pictures of 5800+ fiches is online here now:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1-qdCf3ONeSSYhQvyv-q-qDtOdq6vXROB

Challenge is now to find the few gold grains in this pile.
Best post here if you detect something new you like to see as PDF.

Later we can plan to scan these fiches.
Earlier I used this scanning rig
http://retrocmp.com/projects/scanning-micro-fiches/235-the-homebuild-automatic-micro-fiche-scanner
to save 340 XXDP listings, now at
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp11/microfiche/ftp.j-hoppe.de/

I hope there are better ways to mass-process these fiche collections now.
If not, I'll try to put my scanner in operation again.

And if you have a box full of DEC fiches sitting somewhere, and you want to get rid of it,
sent them to me free of charge. I'll see wether I can index them too.

kind regards,
Joerg

Great job done again, Jörg!

I just browsed through the VAX-11/750 documentation since it is of interest to me personally.

These I haven't found online:

VDDECLIBS-3542.jpg: DW750-TD-001
VDDECLIBS-3592.jpg: VXD75-UG-002
VDDECLIBS-3589.jpg, VDDECLIBS-3590.jpg, VDDECLIBS-3591.jpg: VAXV3-HB-002 (-001 is online)
VDDECLIBS-3582.jpg, VDDECLIBS-3582.jpg: GA750-RM-001

The latter would be very interesting to get online if possible.

I do have three big blue boxes filled with fiches as well. Mostly I think it is exactly the same set that you have already done such a great job on. I will try to find fiches there which are not among those that you have online. But it will take a while due to corona virus.
 
Hi all,

I'm Simon from hack42, the Arnhem hackerspace with its own computer museum.
We also have a small box of micro fiches and we acquired a Agfa XY-15 scanner doing 15kdpi on 35mm sizes as it contains a optical zooming facility. I am in the process of writing scrips to digitize these micro fiches as the scan software is script-able, albeit in a unique formatting. the scanner takes about 1 minute per page, but you can setup about 5 fiches in one go. that means that if the fiches are completely full, you start the scanner and come back a few hours later to setup another batch.
There are a few problems. the scanner software is running on a mack G4 Quicksilver running Mac OS 9.2.2, limiting the throughput somewhat and only having 100m ethernet and firewire. I found a OS X version of this software, but I know there is a Windows xp version as well.
only problem so far is not the resolution of the scanner, its the quality of the fiches. they are optical copies of maybe intermediate negatives and the lettering is quite blurry.

I found this thread because I was looking for a digital version of fiche "md-11-dzkla-e", i just scanned to find out if this was already online somewhere.

My idea was to make a bundle: in one directory, ending up as one pdf are:
-total scan of the fiche
-separate scans of all the pages on the fiche
-index kind of column in the lower right corner
the page naming scheme i was thinking about is the one used on the fiche: colums are numbered 01 and up, rows start at letter B and go up to N

the header shows the following info:
KL11/DL11 teletype tests MD-11-DZKLA-E EP-DZKLA-E-DL-A Copyright 1976, fiche 1 of 1 Mov 1976 DIGITAL made in usa
but my question is: what should be the name of the pdf document? and for that matter the separate pages, ending in 01B etc. (as this is sorting the right way)

my pages turn out to be A4 landscape in around 535dpi 16bit greyscale tiff
example scans:

https://photos.simski.nl/picture.php?/263/category/11
https://photos.simski.nl/picture.php?/270/category/11
 
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I saw them. Nice setup. We have a fiche viewer as well, but i can barely see it in the sorage room as we are in the process of moving to a new space. I like the XY-15 way as it frees me for a couple of hours while the scanning is progressing.

But that stll leaves the question of filenames.
 
LMFAO

Hope you have several generations of people planning on dealing with this project.

Well the other method only needs a third of the generations, so that is of course way better.
Anyway, this is here and works. I dont have to search for an x y moving setup, adapt it to our viewer, program an arduino with the right gerber file parser, write the python software to generate the gerber files, iterate over several versions to get it right and set up the room with dark curtains, camera, focus.
After thousand minutes thousand scans are made, all in the right directory ready to compile into a pdf. In the mean time i could build the other scanner setup, but going to work and earn some money is also possible.

But im happy you had your laugh
 
So the archive of scans is through FTP rather than the google drive ?

Haven't been able to get in via FTP ?
 
Supertoll!

I have some PDP8 related micro fishes, I believe about the RL8A for example. If you want you can have them.

Regards, Roland
 
Guys,

the next version of my Automatic Micro Fiche scanner is operational!

Much smaller than the previous one, which didn't survived the move of our computer club.

It now fits on a desktop.

See here a demonstration video:

https://youtu.be/X22gr5THBRA

Now scanning can start again ... but which fiche first?

kind regards,
Joerg

Hi Joerg,

Congratulations. I am quite impressed by your nice fiche scanner setup shown in the video.
Well done!

Best regards
Tom Hunter
 
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