1 Oct
2020
1 Oct
'20
8:59 p.m.
I have never figured out why Bob Supnik defined the magnetic tape
containers (TAP files) with the one byte padding for odd length records.
This seems very odd (pun intended). :-)
Even on a machine which couldn't write 32 bit numbers (the record lenght)
on odd boundaries you could write the 32 bit number as 4 individual bytes.
Does anyone know the reason?
Cheers
Tom Hunter
On Fri, Sep 18, 2020 at 9:17 AM Jeff Woolsey via cctech <
cctech at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Acoustically,
the best tapes were the short-record "stranger" tapes.
All sorts of interesting noise. I could tell from across the room when
someone was running the tape section of the Navy audit tests for COBOL
just by the sounds.
MALET was also pretty good, reading and writing a bunch of blocks that
were one frame longer or shorter than the last. Loud rising or falling
tone in the noisy computer room.
--
Jeff Woolsey {{woolsey,jlw}@jlw,first.last@{gmail,jlw}}.com
Nature abhors straight antennas, clean lenses, and empty storage.
"Delete! Delete! OK!" -Dr. Bronner on disk space management
Card-sorting, Joel. -Crow on solitaire