Pertec Tape Drive Interface Musings

[Chuck Guzis]

On 06/10/2015 02:07 PM, Dennis Boone wrote:
>
> With that in mind, it might be worth having the putative new spec use a
> different name and file extension for itself.

Well, it could be, but if it were my show, I'd greatly extend the file 
format to accommodate not only the occurrence of a tape error, but also 
the "type" of error.    Some formatters will raise the error flag during 
the transmission of a single frame in error.  It might be useful to have 
some way to notate that--assuming that a controller is capable of 
recording such an event.

In my case, it's mostly reading tapes and providing the data to 
customers.   So blocked EBCDIC record files have already been unblocked 
with EBCDIC->ASCII translation.  The .TAP file is provided as a 
reference in case of my getting something really wrong.

If it's a UNIX(R)-type unlabeled tape, I extract the data between 
filemarks and assign a name of 0001, 0002 and so forth.

--Chuck