On 12 June 2011 16:06, William Donzelli <[email protected]> wrote: > So when filing these things away on the shelf, would it be safe to > assume that the initial S or G or whatever the first letter of a four > character alphanumeric prefix is, can be ignored? For example, would: > > S100-1234-0 > G100-1234-1 > S101-1234-1 > S101-1235-1 > G101-1235-2
Yes. The first character (always a letter, to my knowledge) is called the "Use Key". The values I know of, with their "old" definitions are: G - Generally available to anyone at no charge S - Sell to anyone. Available to IBM customers free of charge in "quantities sufficient to meet their normal needs" L - Licensed material. A use charge applies in some cases, but the manual remains the property of IBM. Z - IBM Internal Use Only. Not (in theory) available to customers. [Use Key "S" items led to a number of problems in the old days, because the branch office was billed internally for its customers' orders for them, but evidently lacked the authority to refuse them. In the 1970s the university where I worked started ordering S manuals for students, and selling them at the list price, while getting them for nothing from IBM. The BO tried to charge for them, I pointed out the official wording for Use Key "S", and some diplomacy ensued, which resulted in staffers being able to order S books free, but with an agreement that we would not sell or give them to students. Since then IBM's policies on charging for manuals, and of course the very existence of paper manuals, has changed a lot.] The Use Keys came into use somewhere in the late 1960s. Before that, the same numbering system was used, but without the Use Keys, so it makes complete sense to sort without respect to the first alpha character as you show above. But if you have a mix of numbers with and without, you need to parse it determine what you have. Of course the trailing revision number may not be present, and on occasion there may be no dashes. There was historically, from observation, some method to the second and in some cases subsequent characters after the Use Key, though I never saw it documented. And that too seems to have changed over the years. A few things from memory (failing rapidly): Second character: A - hardware books BOF - Bill Of Forms - order number for a group of manuals C - the most common letter for software manuals (operating systems, compilers, etc.) G - Redbooks (formerly the various System Centre, ITSO, etc. books of various colours) H - Less mainstream Program Products mostly N - Technical Newsletters (updates to manuals). See also Q and T. Q - Pseudo order number for an old version (so GQ23-9876 might get you GC12-3456-5 when the -6 version was current) R - IBM Education - course material T - Same as Q except one version older. (Or maybe I have Q and T backwards) V - Audio/Visual stuff, films, slides, presentations, later video tapes X - Reference Cards, booklets, summaries Y - PLMs (logic manuals) Z - found only as ZZ - IBM internal use only n - (numeric) general overviews and more salesy than technical pubs. Also some things like binders and other non books. But some very old technical pubs without a use key were all numeric. Third character: Normally numeric; when alphabetic indicated a microfiche publication, e.g. SCD2-1234 Third and fourth characters taken together give a clue as to the geographic origin of the publication, when not in the USA. 09 - mostly Toronto lab, but some European pubs at times 33 - Hursley? Well, I digress... But it's logically still Friday. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
