[Simh] Has anyone a methodology for accessing TK50s,TK70s, etc

[Tim Shoppa]

Dr Robert Young <rcyoung at aliconsultants.com> wrote at 11/16/05 8:48 AM
> Has anyone worked out a methodology for accessing the contents of 
> "physical" tape media from the simulator? What about multivolume save
> sets? Is there a way to "convert" the tape media into some type of image file?

For most purposes, far and away the most convenient thing to do
is turn all your tapes into tape images first and then work only
with the images.  Lots of tools available to do this, I always did
it with DECUS TPC (and then use Bob's mtcvtv23 utility
to convert over to a .tap - style image) a tool that's been around
for a couple of decades now.

For reading multivolume save sets this works fine because VMS
backup (or RSX BRU or whatever) knows from the label information
that there's a continuation tape.

If you want to generate multivolume savesets onto real physical tapes
this gets a little complicated.

Tim.