The ICL archive of engineering drawings on Fiche is being preserved for the future UK National Computer Museum at Bletchley Park. The large set of cabinets containing the Fiche aperture cards was moved from West Gorton to Bletchley earlier this year.

The index and search information is held in a proprietary database – the system is known as ENDB or later as EM3 – and is due to cease use in Fujitsu by the end of December.

The value of the archive will be much greater with an index, for historical and computer conservation purposes. We need to find a way to extract the index information from the current system, and set it up as data that can be searched on a PC or on the web.

This request is being made on behalf of the BCS Computer Conservation Society and Chris Burton.

Among the pensioner community we must have the expertise to crack this one. Its about getting the information out of a legacy system, and is likely to need software expertise familiar with databases, and also somebody familiar with using ENDB. We need to find one or more people to do this project.

If you think you might be able to help – don’t hesitate to contact The Pensioner Topics Editor (Alan Thomson). He can give more information and will coordinate responses.