• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

DEC documents on manx

legalize

legalize

Experienced Member
Joined
Mar 24, 2006
Messages
391
Location
Salt Lake City, UT, USA
In case you weren't following this thread in the documentation requests forum, I'm planning on having manx automatically ingest documents on bitsavers into it's database. This is based on the heuristics of how files are named on bitsavers to automatically extract document metadata like part numbers and publication dates from the filename. This isn't perfect, but it's mostly correct for bitsavers documents. When I deploy that, it will result in a massive ingestion of bitsavers documents for many companies into manx. Currently the biggest barrier to getting documents into the database is waiting for manual curation of the documents. For small collections or isolated URLs, this isn't a significant burden, but for bitsavers the backlog is just simply too huge for this to be a viable long-term solution. Since things are named fairly uniform on bitsavers, it can be done mostly by heuristic.

You may want to consider subscribing to manx's RSS feed if you want to get updates on new documents added to the database.
 
This looks terrific! I'm new to this space, and have recently started scanning, OCS'ing, and uploading docs to archive.org (here: https://archive.org/details/@save_the_machine).

So far, I've been using an Epson Workforce printer with a 11x17 ADF scanner (no fancy photo-scanning setup yet).

We (Save the Machine) have a trove of IBM 360 & 370 and Plessey Systems PDP-11 peripheral documents / schematics to contribute.
 
FoothillsGeek said:
We (Save the Machine) have a trove of IBM 360 & 370 and Plessey Systems PDP-11 peripheral documents / schematics to contribute.
Click to expand...

That sounds very good indeed. You wouldn't happen to have any docs for the Plessey PM-1100 8KW and 16KW Unibus memory modules would you? Or 360/40?
 
Look on bitsavers.org before duplicating work
Don't create scans of bi-tonal documents in JPEG. I can see compression artifacts all over your 11/34 print set (which has already been scanned)
 
Here's my advice for scanning:

For black and white documents (e.g. most manuals):
  1. Scan at 300 dpi minimum, 600 dpi preferred.
  2. Turn off any settings for automatic page orientation and sizing. Set the orientation and size explicitly if necessary.
  3. Use a bitonal TIFF image compression algorithm for the scans.
  4. For oversize sheets (schematics, foldout diagrams, etc.), scan them in overlapping segments and use Microsoft ICE to reassemble them into a single page.
The rationale for these choices are:
  1. At 600 dpi, the half-tone pattern of photographs and diagrams is resolved, resulting in no aliasing.
  2. Using an explicit page dimension prevents each scanned page from appearing at slightly different pixel dimensions, making for a more uniform document. Automatic page orientation algorithms are often confused by diagrams with text at odd angles.
  3. Bitonal TIFF compression results in lossless compression of the bitonal scan. JPEG encoding will create aliasing artifacts everywhere and cause OCR algorithms to be confused.
  4. This is the easiest way to deal with scans of pages that are larger than the physical dimensions of your scanner. Be careful to save the resulting composite as PNG to avoid JPEG artifacts.
The most common mistakes when scanning are:
  • Using grayscale JPEG encoding for scans. This results in very large file sizes and JPEG compression artifacts. The compression artifacts can make fine details of documents illegible.
  • Letting the scanner decide settings to "help" you. When scanning a single page form for sending to a colleague, this is fine, but usually not what you want when scanning documentation.
 
1944GPW said:
That sounds very good indeed. You wouldn't happen to have any docs for the Plessey PM-1100 8KW and 16KW Unibus memory modules would you? Or 360/40?
Click to expand...

I have Core Memory Manuals for:
PM-1100
PM-1105
PM-1105BP
PM-1116B
PM-1132
PM-80

I will add the PM-1100 to the top of my queue.
 
Al Kossow said:
Look on bitsavers.org before duplicating work
Don't create scans of bi-tonal documents in JPEG. I can see compression artifacts all over your 11/34 print set (which has already been scanned)
Click to expand...

Thanks. I had been checking bitsavers and archive.org and didn't see that particular doc. Must have missed it.
 
FoothillsGeek said:
We (Save the Machine) have a trove of IBM 360 & 370 and Plessey Systems PDP-11 peripheral documents / schematics to contribute.
Click to expand...
I have a system with the following Plessey boards that I have been able to find little to no documentation for. If you have any manuals, schematics,etc for any of these, I'd love to get a scan.

PM DLV11J -- 4 Serial Lines (I have a scan of 6 pages for this card)
PM SV128 -- Memory, 128Kwords (I have a scan of 7 pages for this card)
PM XCV31 -- Floppy Disc Controller (I have a scan of 6 pages for this card)
PM MFV11B -- Multi-Function Board
PM DCV06B -- Disc Controller
PM KTV9H -- Terminator

Even if you don't have anything on any of the above cards, thanks for the preservation work you're doing.

By the way, the system with the above boards is a Plessey Peripheral Systems type/model 6632/2, serial #210. It looks like it was built on 5/11/1984. It's an 11/23 with a DEC M8186 CPU card. The system is very complete, including chassis, power supplies, additional controllers, hard drives, 2 8" floppies. But it's not been powered on in about a decade.

Ron's Plessey QBUS cards installed 2.jpg
 
I have scanned the manual of my SMS 1000 Model 30 system. Publication Nr. 3001457, Revision A. So what should I do with it? It turned out to be rather large (425Mbyte). It's a PDF you can search.

Peter
 
zamp said:
I have a system with the following Plessey boards that I have been able to find little to no documentation for. If you have any manuals, schematics,etc for any of these, I'd love to get a scan.

PM DLV11J -- 4 Serial Lines (I have a scan of 6 pages for this card)
PM SV128 -- Memory, 128Kwords (I have a scan of 7 pages for this card)
PM XCV31 -- Floppy Disc Controller (I have a scan of 6 pages for this card)
PM MFV11B -- Multi-Function Board
PM DCV06B -- Disc Controller
PM KTV9H -- Terminator
View attachment 56914
Click to expand...

Sorry, I'm not seeing any of these. Looks like it all has dates of 1977 and earlier. If I find any of these I'll let you know.
 
I don't know why this document was so large, I used the normal document settings I always used which up to know gave reasonable document sizes. Anyhow, as I had to combine the odd and even pages I use a PDF tool which mixed and sorted the pages and then also allowed me to "compress" it, and uploaded it to the Al's site.
 
As the original scans were larger than 50Mbyte all free online tools did not work. So I purchased a 7 days option of Sejda PDF Desktop from https://www.sejda.com to mix and merge the Odd and Even pages and I also used the Compress option to squeeze it from 420Mbyte down to 51Mbyte. This tool seems to work very well. I have uploaded the document to bitsavers. Now Al has to put it into the correct directory. Or you can wait until I have updated my homepage with a new post regarding my newest acquisition, the SMS 1000 Model 30, which I'm in the process of reanimating.

First I also tried pdftk which was a complete failure on macOS. It did not work at all, it just accepted the command line and then nothing happend and I had to cancel the process. I was too lazy to try it on a linux machine (although I have one, but I would have to boot it first). According to the documentation and hints you can find on the web it should be able to do exactly what I did with Sejda.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top