Tymshare PDP-10 tapes

Tony Aiuto tony.aiuto at gmail.com
Fri Mar 5 09:45:34 CST 2021


On Fri, Mar 5, 2021 at 4:55 AM Lars Brinkhoff via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Someone sent me these magtape images from Tymshare and said "they fell
> off the back of a truck on route 62 in Hudson, MASS."  I don't know
> their provenance.
>
> Sorry, I don't have any good hosting.  For now they are here:
> https://gitlab.com/larsbrinkhoff/tymshare
>
> The download.sh script will retrieve individual files one by one rather
> than cloning the repository; next use cat.sh to get the .tape.bz2 files.
>
> The tape format is close to not not quite FAILSAFE.  With help from Joe
> Smith, I made a tool to extract the files:
> https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/pdp10-its-disassembler/blob/master/tito.c


I'm not having any luck with either back10 or tito.

$ sha1sum 169249.tape
1230fb20086990a1ff777fce32591f2900425694  169249.tape     (So that's good)
$ ./tito -x -f 169249.tape
fopen: Is a directory
$ bin/back10 -l -f 169249.tape | head
  18-Nov-1858 00:00:00  <754>  dsk:[1,1][3,700202].ufd
  18-Nov-1858 00:00:00  <754>  dsk:[1,1][3,700004].ufd
  18-Nov-1858 00:00:00  <754>  dsk:[1,1][3,700220].ufd
$ bin/back10 -x -f 169249.tape
...

that gets lots of files with names like 'dsk:[1,4]specdf525].mic'
That just seems wrong.


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