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:

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.
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 itself¹ 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 accurately². 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.

For example using a space separated console prompt such as > > > to combat LaTeX conversion of >> into >> ↩︎
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. ↩︎