Brad> Hi, Brad> I made an image of an old tape I have (I think it has a copy of Brad> the whitesmith's C compiler on it). Brad> I'm not sure how it was made, however. I think it is just done Brad> with PIP. It has a lot of tape marks separated by a variable Brad> number of records. Brad> The first record of each tape 'file' is 14 bytes. All records Brad> after that are 512 bytes. The 512 byte records are clearly the Brad> file contents. After the file contents there is a tape mark. Brad> I'm guessing the 14 bytes is radix-50 file name + info. Brad> What's the best way to make sense of this from unix? (short of Brad> running RSTS on an emulator). Is there a unix/dos program Brad> which which can interpret the data? Don't know. What you have is a standard "DOS label" tape. It's called that because that format was first used in DOS-11, then adopted by RSTS. Some of the other OSs switched to ANSI labels more enthousiastically than RSTS did, but I'd think that they can all read that. VMS too, probably -- is there a "FLX" tool in VMS? Yes, the first three words are name.ext in rad50. Next is PPN, but that's always [1,1] except in DOS which took that field more seriously. There's also a protection code, again not meaningful except in DOS. The creation date is at offset 10, in DOS format (year since 1970 * 1000 + day-in-year). So the format is pretty trivial, you can just read it directly. Come to think of it, if you know which files you want, just read the tape straight, and strip off the first 14 bytes. Text files will be just plain CRLF-delimited text, no RMS stuff on DOS tapes... paul