Archiving 8" RT-11 floppies to CD-ROM?

Subject: RE: Archiving 8" RT-11 floppies to CD-ROM? From: Ian King <IanK at vulcan.com> Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 11:57:30 -0800 To: "'General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts'" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> I've developed a procedure for this. It's a bit roundabout but it uses easily available tools. Tools needed: - PDP-11 running RT-11, with an extra serial line (SLUx) - DOS PC with a serial port - PUTR program from John Wilson - TU58 emulator, which I found through Will Kranz' website At a high level the process looks like this: Install TU58 per its README file. Copy the contents of the floppy onto the emulated TU58 using the COPY/DEVICE command in RT-11. Some versions will gripe at you about the fact that the floppy may be bigger than the tape. RT-11 v4 seems perfectly happy with that, and the TU58 program doesn't care. :-) IIRC there are prompts from RT-11 v5, but you can provide answers that will direct it to do the full copy anyway. Use PUTR to copy from that tape image onto... whatever you want! PUTR will let you manipulate the individual files and copy them into DOS directories if you so choose. By using COPY/DEVICE, you can preserve "bootability" of bootable disks, as well. I've used the reverse of this process to create physical floppies from disk images as well as to restore floppies after disk failures. Of course, if you want to burn either the images or the individual files onto a CDROM, you'll have to have the files on a machine that supports that device, has burner software, etc. But at that point, they're just files in a DOS filesystem. Cheers -- Ian