PARSEC Technical Information

Starting in August 1983, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) began publishing a series of technical journals in the areas of their various technology strengths – the Digital Technical Journal (DTJ) library was one of the best of these series.

Usually published semi-annually (that's twice per year), each issue of DTJ was a treasure-trove of technical information, several focused and polished articles each volume, and usually written by a DEC VMS Engineering team member or another expert in the field. The articles themselves covered a huge spectrum, from programming languages to systems design/implementation, from Rdb database performance to VMS performance, from VMS security to VMSclusters.

Sometime during the past year or so (this update from early 2023), VMS Software Inc. (VSI) managed to find and assemble all DTJ volumes into one page of its website – they've thankfully archived the complete DTJ series and make it available to us here:

The Complete Digital Technical Journal Archive

Thanks to this development, you can stop reading this page right here…

…or if you want to follow the now-irrelevant history, read on:

It would be nice to point to a complete reference of the entire Digital Technical Journal series; unfortunately a web-search turns up this link: http://h41379.www4.hpe.com/openvms/journal/ which itself is full of broken links to the actual journal issues. Sadly, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE, and its predecessor HP) have not been very good stewards of this valuable technical-journal library, nor of many of the other VMS sacred relics that they obtained through Compaq Computer Corp from the late, lamented Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).

However, in spite of the broken links in the above web-page, we've discovered that (at least for now), individual Digital Technical Journal issues can be retrieved “manually” via a URL of this form:

http://h41379.www4.hpe.com/openvms/journal/vXX/index.html

where the XX is a Volume Number from 1 to 15 – For example, to get to OVTJ Volume 12, use this URL:

http://h41379.www4.hpe.com/openvms/journal/v12/index.html

We're testing this trick for the full sequence of issues, and will report back here if we discover any URLs of this form which are broken and lead to a “missing DTJ volume”. So far, we've reliably downloaded DTJ Volumes 1 through 15, although Volume 1 had to be downloaded as individual articles (a .PDF file each), and Volumes 13 and 14 were available only as a zipped archive-file (each, with individual .PS articles). Volumes 2 through 12 and Volume 15 were a .PDF per issue. There's some indication that the series ran to at least Volume 20, but we've not yet turned up Volumes 16 thru 20. We'll update here if we do.

When visiting a particular DTJ volume's web-page itself, you may find either a link to the whole journal/issue (as one PDF document), or you'll find links to the individual articles as either PS (PostScript) or PDF documents – some of these individual links may be “broken” (404), but usually at least one of them gets to actual article-or-issue documents. Be persistent, try each of the links you find.

HPE may further “break” or “lose” this library with any future update of their websites (this happens all too frequently), so as a safeguard, you may want to download any and all issues and articles you can find therein.