8 Dec
2016
8 Dec
'16
6:42 a.m.
On 12/07/2016 12:46 PM, Rich Alderson wrote:
Neither of those is entirely accurate. 9-track tapes
on the PDP-10
used one of the following encodings:
The last time that I had to deal with PDP-10 tapes, admittedly also 40
years ago was essentially core-dump format. 5 7-bit characters per
word, with one bit unused; words packed end-to-end; i.e. 9 frames for 2
PDP 10 words.
It was the "Adventure" game, smuggled to me by a DEC field engineer.
Translating to CDC display code and then dealing with the differences in
FORTRAN made the work interesting. The thing spread like wildfire
throughout the CDC corporate system and was ardently hunted and purged
by COMSOURCE administrators.
--Chuck