Archiving Software

Sorry to drag this out (and interrupt the dialogue between Dave & Tony) but, while I appreciate the replies I have had, I still have some questions. As I said, I'm not too concerned with bootable system disks; in the case of the Vector I'll settle for a disk copy and good old postal service if anyone ever needs one (unless Dave D, who will inherit my Vector anyway, decides to modify his NS* bootstrap program to work on the Vector). Any other system disks I have in a format that the PC can read & write I will image with Dave's program. And thanks to Gord Tulloch, BTW, who sent me the Vector disks in the first place - I haven't forgotten about you (or JP). I'm in the process of getting rid of all 10 of my Cromemcos (except for one, at least for the time being). Before I do (and for some time after), I'm going through several hundred 5" and 8" diskettes and about 200 MB of stuff on HDs to delete or at least remove any confidential data and archive anything useful. Since a lot of this stuff is more or less machine- and disk-size independent (as long as it's a Z80 CP/M or CDOS system - not sure about the 68000/10/20 stuff), it seems to make more sense to archive actual file sets instead of imaging disks; that does indeed seem to be what's been done for most of the CP/M stuff on the Web. Also, it looks like I can dump some of it since most of the common apps like dBase, Wordstar, Visicalc etc. are already available on the Web. On the other hand, although Howard Harte and Herb Johnson have a pretty comprehensive collection of manuals, I can't find the corresponding software anywhere; is there a site somewhere that already has stuff like the Cromemco languages (Fortran, Cobol, PL/I etc.) and OSs archived? There's no problem at my end; the Cromemco can read & write 5" PC format disks, 8" SSSD (at least) CP/M disks, and of course 5" and 8" CDOS and Cromix disks as well as DC600 tapes, and can transfer files via RS-232. But the question I still have is how to specifically (and easily) restore these files to another system running CP/M or CDOS/Cromix without a means of transferring files from the PC. I ran across something called PIPMODEM which seems to be one solution; I wonder if anyone here has ever installed/used it and its companion programs? Another way seems to be to convert binary <> ASCII, PIP to/from the console and convert back; I looked around but couldn't find/figure out what I need at both ends/directions. Also, once you've got a primitive transfer method installed, do you then need a full-blown comm program to routinely transfer files with xmodem/kermit/whatever? The reason I ask is that on the Cromemco there is just a small .bin file (pckt.bin) which is automatically invoked from the terminal (PC) end when transferring files; that is, you can be sitting at a prompt, select up/download [filename] on the PC and away you go (as opposed to opening a comm program on the host and putting it in send/receive mode). Is there anything like that for CP/M? And for the Unix gurus: if, as in Cromix, tar files are not ordinary files (i.e. you ordinarily tar to a device, not a file name), how would one convert a tar tape to a file in order to transfer it? I could of course restore the tar file to the HD and then tar it again to a file but that seems awkward. Could I just pipe the "un"tar back to tar (i.e. tar [device] - | tar - [filename])? How do you folks do this sort of thing? Again, sorry if in my ignorance I'm beating this subject to death. m