At work (National Center for Atmospheric Research), we commonly stored tape contents in the Cray COS blocked data set format. It is pretty reasonable as it contains record and block control words that allow you to seek both forward and backward within the dataset, and to retain tape marks as end of file or end of dataset marks. There were many tapes containing historical weather observations ingested and stored on the Mass Storage System (MSS) in this format. While the MSS has been replaced by an HPSS archive, most of the 2 PB of data were migrated into it, so undoubtedly there are still COS blocked data set tape images in the archive. If anyone has data stored in this format, I do have some C code that will read and write it.
> From:?Ric Barline <rbarline at mac.com>
> To:?cctech at classiccmp.org
> Date:?Fri, 30 Mar 2012 14:26:27 -0700
> Subject:?help with H11 and H27
> Hi. Brand new to this list. I joined because based on your past posts I believe you guys might be able to help me with my problem. I just acquired an old Heathkit system consisting of an H19 terminal, an H11 computer, and an H27 disk drive. I have managed to get the H19 and H11 talking to each other (see my short video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzZ3HHd1V3o&feature=youtu.be but I don't have any documentation for the H27 so I don't know how to use it with the H11. ?I have two floppies that came with it (actually I have a bunch that came with it as shown in my photo gallery http://gallery.me.com/rbarline#100619), one titled "Softech UCSD H11 System Disk" and one titled "Softech UCSD System H11 Utilities".
>
> Can anyone help me figure out what to type on the terminal in order to get the disk drive to start the boot process? Thanks in advance.
The Rhode Island Computer Museum has the same system, but no software.
https://sites.google.com/a/ricomputermuseum.org/home/Home/equipment/heathki…
It would be great if you could make images of the diskettes and send
them to Al Kossow for archiving.
--
Michael Thompson
