[ale] Engineering Archaeology

Sat Jan 10 14:39:21 EST 2026

I remember that DEC often had "retirement" sessions for products that discussed:

o do we have any active support contracts?
o how does this retirement affect other still active products?
o other things I have forgotten

I remember attending one of these sessions for "DECtape" (also known as "LincTape") a little round reel of tape that I LOVED when I was a student in 1969.   Programs that would take 30 minutes to load from paper tape would load in seconds using LinkTape, and you could store huge amounts of data on it.

As I said, I used this as a student in 1969, on a DEC Linc-8 computer, a blending of DEC's Linc computer and a PDP-8, but I know they were still active on PDP-7s, PDP-11s and PDP-8s (and probably more machines).   They were affordable, rugged and could easily fit in your (large) pocket.

Years later came the "retirement" meeting for DECtape, and as people around the room representing various operating systems and service groups (including Ultrix) raised their hands and said that they were ready to pull the plug I realized that none of these people were OLD ENOUGH to actually have used DECtape.

So when it came to me, I told them what DECtape meant for a 19-year old university kid, and asked for a moment of silence for DECtape....and they gave it.

Unbeknownst  to me there was a person sitting in the back of the room taking notes for a book about DEC and its products who copied, almost word for word, what I said and a couple of years later in that book my story appeared.   Still later, in the computer museum that DEC had in Marlboro (which donated a lot of equipment and documentation to the Computer History Museum in California) there was an instance of a PDP-11 along with a DECtape display, and there on a panel were my words again.

One of my fears about e-books, the web and documentation that can disappear as easy as "rm -r *", is that we will lose a LOT of this information and not know where we came from and how we got here.

md

> On 01/10/2026 12:29 PM EST Jim Kinney via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
>  
>  
> Ha! The project book "What this goddamn this is, how it works, and what we thinking when we built it" is NEVER part of the project and should be the first thing done!
>  
> -- 
> James P. Kinney III
> 
> Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.
> - Speech 11/23/1900 Mark Twain
> 
> http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/
> 
> On Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 12:23 PM lollipopman691 via Ale <ale at ale.org mailto:ale at ale.org> wrote:
> 
> > Heh heh.  A very amusing essay. I personally myself set up wiki webs in two of the jobs I had over the years,and contributed extensively to others I found already in place. They're my personal favorite way of preserving this sort of thing.
> > 
> > https://landley.net/history/mirror/institutional_memory.html
> > 
> > -- CHS
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Ale mailing list
> > Ale at ale.org mailto:Ale at ale.org
> > https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> > See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> > http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
> > 
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
> 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20260110/13610922/attachment.htm>