[tal8d]

More an IBM archeology question: aside from the scattered projects to catalog specific product lines, are you aware of a more general effort? I've been pulling together a lot of their research papers and documentation related to the POWER architecture for a while, and I've noticed some pretty big missing pieces. For example: in order to best preserve the pdfs, while increasing their usefulness and reducing their maintenance burden (disk space), I set out to convert them to PDF/A. That means embedded fonts, which is fine - I'd ideally digitize as much of the text as possible (instead of throwing a hidden OCR layer on and calling it a day), but... the font is nowhere to be found. IBM had an extremely popular font, Press Roman, that is very common in journals and books published from the 60s to the late 80s, and as far as I can tell - it may now exist only in whatever remains of two printer font cartridge SKUs. I won't even get started on the problem regarding their plotting software.

It reminds me of how NASA simply lost so much of the original media, and what he have today is either purely accidental or the result of a considerable amount of work done by volunteer restoration groups. We really need to get a grip on this problem now, and it would be nice if IBM would actually help out with that - instead of leaving it to volunteers.