Another PDP-11 Floppy Disk Question (RSTS)

Rick> I have my PDP 11/34 running smoothly with RSTS 9.2, on three Rick> RL02 drives. I've got an RX02 floppy, and RSTS sees it, but at Rick> 9.0, RSTS dropped support of floppies as file-structured Rick> devices. There are two utilities, called FIT and FLINT that Rick> come as part of the distribution, but I've not been able to Rick> find any documentation on these programs. Apparently they Rick> provide a means to access floppies in a semi-file-structured Rick> method, as well as writing floppies in RSTS or IBM formats. Rick> All I've been able to glean is looking through the .TSK files Rick> with a file dumper, and looking at the text portions of the Rick> images, but they aren't very informative. Rick> Anyone got any docs on these two utilities? RSTS NEVER supported native (RSTS format) file structures on RX01/02 floppies. Those were always treated by the kernel as non-file structures block devices, and intended as interchange media only. RX50s and their successors -- 5.25 inch floppies attached to MSCP controllers -- always were file structured and continued that way. That takes no effort since it just uses the common MSCP machinery. In any case... FIT is the interchange program for reading/writing RT-11 file structure (not just on floppies, but on pretty much any block device that RT-11 supports). FLINT is the interchange program for reading "IBM format" -- not sure what that means, not PC format as far as I can tell, since the code is full of EBCDIC handling. So presumably it's for some mainframe floppy format...??!!?? The documentation for both should be in the user's manual, which I don't have. Judging by the source code, it's roughly like this: FIT command line: output/switches=input/switches Switches are /rsts, /rt11 to indicate the format type of input or output. (Also /dos ??? for DOS-11???) /ze to zero (reinit the file system). /de to delete a file (RT side only). /li to list the directory. /sq to do an RT file system compress. /watch to be verbose (show what's going on as it happens). FLINT seems to want a command ("directory", "toibm", "torsts", "zero" (synonym of "erase")); it then prompts for input and output specs. paul