The Great TK revival

[Jerome H. Fine]

 >On Saturday, June 18th, 2016 at 11:22:19 +0100, Rod Smallwood wrote:

> Hi
>
>     The great TK revival continues apace.
>
> There's a TK50 in my VAX 4000 running really well. Purrs like a cat
>
> I have TK70 in the RT-11 (11/83 QED) Machine that also runs.
>
> TK70 should read the TK50 tapes. It tries but complains about cant 
> read the directory.
>
> So whats a common format I can write  on a TK50 tape in a TK50 Drive 
> (VMS)
>
> then take it over to the RT-11 box and have it read it.?
>
> Where is all this going? Well I need to end up with RSTS on an 11/83.
>
> So a bootable TK50 with RSTS install files on it is the goal.
>
> Meanwhile transfer by tape is useful.

Another method of checking any data on any physical device
is to use the RT-11 program, DUMP.SAV, which will display
the individual blocks in the case of a disk drive and the individual
records in the case of a tape.

Unfortunately, my PDP-11 hardware is not available right now.
But I was able to use Ersatz-11 to perform the same operations.

Under RT-11:
INIT  MU0:/NOQU
DUMP/TERM  MU0:

Three 80 byte records and 4 tape marks are displayed as in:

First 80 byte record
Second 80 byte record
TAPE  MARK
TAPE  MARK
Third 80 byte record
TAPE  MARK
TAPE  MARK

If you can display the above data when you INIT the TK70
media on the PDP-11/83 under RT-11, but can't read a TK50
media produced under VMS, then perhaps there may be a hardware
problem.

Let us know what you are able to see.  Then we can help some more.

Jerome Fine