Vassilis,
Interestingly, I have just been through half the process you've just described. I have a HP9000/216 with 9153C, and have transferred the three partitions to PC via *serial* port. Yes - it took a while.

It is my aim to be able to extract individual files from the resultant images, to be able to do whatever with, including building a HP9000 RMB detokeniser. But at least the "image" copies are done.

Howard,
The "private" mechanism on RMBasic merely sets a flag for each line within the tokenised program, and it can be reversed. The program file type is not changed.

Ed,
If your friend is still in need of recovering his programs, I would be able to get them to ASCII source. Contact me if required. But it would still be in RMBasic, and would need either a) to be ported to another language environment, or b) used with HTBasic as mentioned by Chris.

To all, this site and forum are enjoyable reading - many thanks.

Regards,
PeterGW