7 Mar
2005
7 Mar
'05
3:47 p.m.
I've slowly been working through the box of carts that came with the
ISI system that
I just picked up from Erik Klein, but there doesn't appear to be a
complete binary
distribution tape set in the pile. An image or physical cart of a
version from '88 or later
(4.x or 5.x) would be helpful in trying to get the system going again.
Just to get it saved on line somewhere, the format of the cartridges is
a little tricky in
that ISI tape controllers simulate variable blocking on QIC cartridges
by appending
512 bytes of data in front of the actual data blocks. The first few
bytes are all that
matter
for example:
A1FE 0001 0002 2800 0014
is a magic number, file number, block number, and block length (10240
bytes)