Best TOPS-10 tape imaging and DECsystem 10/20 emulation....

From: rescue Sent: Thursday, July 25, 2013 9:20 AM Well, I had written which was only partially correct. The KLH10 package comes with an external utility, tapedd, which can read (and presumably write) real physical tapes and create virtual tapes (i. e., images) in several differ formats: RAW: 8 bit frames, no internal formatting, with a separate tape directory file that describes the location of blocks within the data file TPS: SimH-format tape image TPE: DBit E11-format (similar to SimH, without PDP-11 padding bytes) TPC: DECUS/Shoppa format (similar to SimH but with 2-byte count at start of block only) Your best best, it seems to me, would be to build tapedd on Linux and handle the conversions with it, since it's entirely agnostic about the tape content. Use the SimH conversion unless you only want to run KLH10 (and maybe even then, since KLH10 will accept it). Neither MacOS will handle tape drives. I thought about writing a SCSI tape driver for OSX many years ago, but was talked out of it by [true story] one of the OSX developers from Apple. :-) Any of the Unices should suffice, but Linux is probably easiest. Yeah, be careful with your tapes. We haven't lost any yet, but we've clearly been very very lucky. Rich Alderson Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer Living Computer Museum 2245 1st Avenue S Seattle, WA 98134 mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/