30 Mar
2012
30 Mar
'12
9:57 a.m.
From: Jon Elson
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 9:36 PM
I'm now working on a program to move the entire
tape to a single disk
file with pretty much verbatim bytes from the tape. It will have a
32-bit header for each record of file mark, showing the record size or
file mark. Then I can write programs at my leisure to extract files
without having to listen to the wail of the Gast vane pump in the
keystone tape drive.
I believe you've been asked this in other venues.
Why are you inventing Yet Another Tape Image Format????
Why don't you just use the SimH format, and write your tools to work
with that?
I did that very thing, in PDP-10 assembler, on the Toad-1 at the museum,
and I've been very happy with the results: I can, for example, get an
image of a Tops-10 tape from Trailing Edge, write it to a 9trk tape from
the Toad, and carry it across the room to the tape drives attached to
the DEC-20 running Tops-10 to install.
I can do the same thing for all of our PDP-11s, our Eclipse MVs, and
eventually our Xerox Sigmas (when needed).
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104
mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/