Wow this is a blast from the past to be sure. First off, I can confirm that we did meet Pam of Pamap fame, and we did talk about a connector. I knew it never came to pass but I was surprised to find this in my email archive:

"PAMAP's forestry customers welcomed this news, as FME support for PAMAP

provides an easy solution to the provide of exchanging forest information

between themselves and government agencies."

(http://www.safe.com/fme/future.html" target="_blank">http://www.safe.com/fme/future.html)

That was in an email dated May 1996.

Fortunately for me, the oldest archive.org of that page is Nov 14, 1996:

http://www.safe.com/fme/future.html" target="_blank">https://web.archive.org/web/19961114091639/http://www.safe.com/fme/future.html

And by then Pamap had been taken off our future plans.

So, yes, we did grow up together, but were never more than just casual acquaintances.

So I'm sorry that that we don't have anything that could help. If someone out there had a Pamap install, maybe you could dump the data to something else (MIF?) (ArcInfo Generate?) and from there get to where you need to go.

Ah well, one could hope. Thanks for the spelunking! Unfortunately the road to a functioning Pamap install is rather bumpy as it required a parallel port hardware dongle. I kept mine for years but tossed it when LPT became a rarity and emulators didn't emulate closely enough. PCI bought Pamap and had a reader in PCI Geomatica, which in turn looks like has morphed into Catalyst. I see their docs have a Pamap GDB page anyway. I'll see if I can find a Catalyst-owning contractor willing to do some conversion work inexpensively or favour exchange.