What I meant was are they still on 9-track, or some kind of tape-in-a-file disk? IBM tapes are usually written to AWS format files not the formats (.TAP ?) used by SIMH... Some source to extract some versions of these from AWS files (and windows executables) are in this ZIP file:- http://1drv.ms/1NS4wuo Dave G4UGM

IBM standard labels are older than ANSI. Then again, IBM (in OS/360 at least) had something they called "ANSI label" that were not actually ANSI at all. They used "8 bit ASCII" which was a bizarre code created from standard 7 bit ASCII by moving one or two of the bits (bit 6 to bit 7? I don't remember). paul

some tape. filemark. That's for the same reason MS DOS does not put standard labels on DDS or DAT tape. CMS is the original personal computing environment. Each user gets an individual isolated virtual machine and the IPL's CMS into their machine. CMS is a single-user operating system and within that virtual machine they can do what they want. A normal user can't see much outside their virtual environment, but inside it they are god. They can even single step through CMS. As there are many VMs in a VM/370 environment Users can put whatever they want on their tapes. It is up to the operators or other privileged user to "attach" the physical tapes to the users' virtual machine and mount the tapes with or without a ring. Once its attached the user can put what they want on the tape, provided it has a write ring in it. Trying to insist on standard labels would be pretty pointless. CMS TAPE files are not intended to be used by other systems and the format is undocumented (well except a little in the source code) and has changed several times as disk formats have changed. They contain physical dumps of the DASD (disk) followed by the matching directory block. They may contain multiple files. You know a file is complete when you hit is directory block. So unlike OS tapes you don't need to specify a block factor and record type. You just do "TAPE DUMP <filename> <filemode> <disk letter> where the names may contain the usual wild cards and they get dumped. To see what is on a tape do "TAPE SCAN" and to load them do "TAPE LOAD". No JCL, no DD cards no knowledge of the underlying record formats are required. CMS includes a "MOVEFILE" command that can produce standard label tapes in the usual OS/DOS formats but normally users don't bother unless they are sending tapes to other sites... Dave

On 12/16/2015 11:43 AM, Chuck Guzis wrote: I paid for Sytos backup a number of times, but they did run off the rails mad with power. Between them and SCO unix and general experiences concurrent with Stallman's as far as proprietary software was what put me off onto Open Source long in advance of Linux and GPL. I don't agree with the social engineering aspects of Stallman, but I do not see that having hidden source makes any more sense than having a car you can't open the hood on. The engineers and company will loose interest in a product and that sort of disposable attitude makes no sense. Sytos had an excellent product for the time though as far as doing backups. But the back end stuff as Chuck said, not so good.

On 12/16/2015 12:11 PM, Dave Wade wrote: Yes! Peter Coghlan has graciously offered to jump into the fray and take care of this. Results will make for a very happy customer. A lot of this conversion stuff is coming down to the question "Will I ever see another one of these in my lifetime?". If the answer is "no", I get increasingly lazy when it comes to spinning code of my own. --Chuck

On 12/16/2015 10:08 AM, Chuck Guzis wrote: Does the first block have a PSW looking thing in the appropriate start, and an I/O program to boot the next record from the boot device?

If it's an 80 byte record, the PSW is further into the block. the first 80 positions from the Green card should be a clue. thanks jim On 12/16/2015 12:35 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:

On 12/16/2015 01:19 PM, jwsmobile wrote: No, the first record is 4101 bytes long. Interestingly, all blocks on this tape are an odd number of bytes in length. --Chuck

From the IBM 360/40 functional characteristics: When IPL is initiated, the selected input device starts reading. The first 24 bytes read are placed in storage locations 0-23. Storage protection, program controlled interruption, and a possible incorrect length indication are ignored. The double word read into location 8 is used as the channel command word (ccw) for a subsequent I/O operation. When chaining is specified in this ccw, the operation proceeds with the ccw in location 16. Either command chaining or data chain- ing may be specified. After the input operation is performed, the I/O ad- dress is stored in bits 21-31 of the first word in storage. Bi~s 16-20 are made zero. Bits 0-15 remain unchanged. The CPU subsequently fetches the double word in location 0 as a new psw and proceeds under control of the new psw. The load light is turned off. When the I/O operations and psw loading are not completed sat- isfactorily, the CPU idles, and the load light remains on. I think that the 24 bytes besides covering useful locations in the bottom of memory may be the minimum record size for the half inch drives. So you may see 24 bytes or you may see 80. I've been used to seeing a two "card" boot somewhere, but that isn't the discussion here, since we are talking probably a cms file. Also may be off in the weeds, as far as this is concerned. if you bring up a copy of the VM/370, and convert this to an AWS tape, on some available CMS drive, you should be able to read it in with some command line incantation. How you would edit it from there with the public domain VM/370's editing is anyones guess. XEDIT is licensed, so you won't have something easy to use to edit and save it if it is a text file. By the time you figure all that out, assuming you don't regularly use either VM/370 or MVS 3.8 on Hercules, or have access to IBM facilities to use actual IBM products, coding and squinting at your results will probably produce the result faster. I'm guessing you already have it in process anyway. thanks JIm On 12/16/2015 12:35 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:

On 12/16/2015 7:57 AM, Paul Koning wrote: On the Microdata 1621 system we had it was 4 assembler instructions in a loop to convert a string from Ascii to Ebcdic using that weird ascii code. I use a table now when I code in C to convert from that ASCII to what we call ascii. I call it high bit on ascii, but it isn't precisely that. I have an entire OS that uses that, and I ran across it back in the 70's on a few other minis, but the ANSI version supplanted it early on. FWIW referring to the Jay West 1600's from University of Missouri, Rolla thanks Jim

the You don't need VM/370, Hercules includes a "tapecopy" command that will copy Dave