---
address: GitHub
author:
- The DEC Documentation Rebuild Project
title: ReadMe
---

Welcome to the DEC Documentation Rebuild project. This project, driven
by the community, aims to recreate as much of the documentation for
vintage Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) computer equipment and
software as possible.

The reason for this is twofold:

1.  Much of the documentation is in a poor state. It can be hard to make
    out some parts of it due to bad scanning, or generally poor source
    material.

2.  The existing documentation can be very hard to work with. Scanned
    PDFs, even with advanced OCR, are hard to search and navigate.
    Rebuilding the documentation gives us the chance to correct that
    with embedded hyperlinks, clean text, and a generally more usable
    experience.

# How we are doing it

It is highly likely (backed up by some evidence from the documentation
itself[^1]) the original documentation is written in LaTeX. In order to
try and maintain as much of the original layout and pagination as
closely as possible to the original LaTeX has again been chosen as the
method to re-create the documentation. This also lets us separate out
the style from the content making it much faster, once suitable document
classes have been created, to recreate documents with the minimum of
effort.

# Contributing

You'd like to contribute? Fantastic! We are always looking for more
volunteers to help recreate more documents. Just fork this repository
and get writing. Most of the groundwork has been done for you in the
form of some handy document classes (dec.cls and decsectional.cls) that
implement reasonably accurately[^2]. By all means take a look at one of
the existing LaTeX files for an idea of how to go about implementing the
document.

We only have a few stipulations when it comes to style, both of content
and general working:

-   The hyperref package is automatically included in the base dec.cls
    file. Please use hyperlinks and hyperrefs within the document to
    link to sections, figures and tables where they are mentioned in the
    text. Also please use the \
    `pdf{...} ` command to wrap any references to other DEC documents.
    This just creates a href to a PDF document in the same directory at
    the moment though that may be subject to change in the future.

-   Your document should be named by the order number of the document
    (for example EK-VAXAC-OM-003.tex) with any sub-parts being named the
    same but with a hyphenated suffix (for example
    EK-VAXAC-OM-003-ch1.tex).

-   In DEC documentation all figures have a reference number associated
    with them which denotes the author, their image sequence number, and
    the year of production. When you cut out an image from the original
    scanned PDF please include this reference number. Name the image
    file with this reference number and place it in the **fig** folder,
    then use the \
    `fig{ref}{caption} ` command to reference it within your document.

-   Title page images should be stored in the **titles** folder and
    named after the order number of the document.

When transcribing you should attempt to match the layout and pagination
of the original document as possible. This is chiefly so that someone
who is referencing the original scanned PDF and someone who is
referencing the rebuilt PDF both get the same page numbers for the same
information and can collaborate more seamlessly. Some bleed of
paragraphs from page to page is fine, but tables, figures, and sections
should be on the same pages as the original where possible.

# License

These documents are provided with no warranty as regards their accuracy
whatsoever. The document class files are provided under the CC-BY 4.0
license for you to use and adapt for your own purposes as you see fit.
We hope you find them useful. The document content and images remain
©Digital Equipment Corporation or the current owner of their trademarks
and copyrights (either HPE or VSI at the moment) and are provided and
used as an educational resource for archival and learning purposes.

[^1]: For example using a space separated console prompt such as `> > >`
    to combat LaTeX conversion of \>\> into \>\>

[^2]: Apart from the fonts which we have tried to find reasonable
    matches for in the standard LaTeX font library, but has proved
    almost impossibe - and we don't want to have to use third party
    fonts to complicate matters.
