DEC manuals
DEC manuals were accumulated by DEC over several decades. Dating, as it did, from the early days of the industry, and originally catering primarily to engineers, who were able to repair and modify their DEC machines, it always had the habit of making available extensive documentation on its machines.
Many have now been scanned, and are available on/through the Internet; this is a huge benefit to the museums and many collectors who now keep, maintain and run collectable DEC gear.
Identification/numbering system
Similar to DEC engineering drawing numbers, DEC manuals all had an identification 'number' (it included letters). There were two different systems: one in use up to about April, 1975; the other, thereafter.
In the first, they had the form 'DEC-ww-xxxxxx-y-z'; 'ww' was a number which indicated which line the manual was for/associated-with (e.g. "10" for the PDP-10, "11" for PDP-11's). The rest were all letters; 'z' indicated the revision level of that particular manual, so the first one had an 'A'.
In the second, they had the form 'ww-xxxx-yy-zzz'. 'ww' was an alphabetic code (similar to DECdrawing codes), which indicated what class of document it was. The following codes are known:
- AA - Software documentation
- AD - Addenda
- AE - Software Product Description
- AV - Reference cards
- DS - /Alpha CPU/Chipset documentation
- EC - Alpha system component documentation
- EK - Hardware Documentation
- EY - Educational Services
The next field, 'xxxx', indicated which type of system/module the manual was for. 'yy' indicated the type of manual it was; the following typs (again, similar to drawing codes) are known:
- MM - 'Maintenance Manual'
- OP - 'Operator's Manual'
- TM - 'Technical Manual'
- UG - 'User Guide'
The 'zzz' was a number indicating the revision level of the manual at hand; it started at '001'.
See also
External links
- DEC - the primary online collection is at Bitsavers
- Manx - Manx indexes many online collections of manuals
- Documentation
- Main Scanned Document List - at Wilber Williams' Computer Museum
- 'Missing' Digital Equipment Corporation Field Maintenance Print Sets Online
