[Simh] Making tape/disk images

[Carl Lowenstein]

On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 5:36 PM, Michael Richter <ttmrichter at gmail.com> wrote:
> Larry,
> RSTS/E v9.6 is the guest operating system.  Using another SIMH simulation to
> do this isn't really suitable.  (To begin with I haven't yet solved the
> problem of getting the OpenVMS CD, but that's a different issue.)  I have
> loose files--many of them--I want to get into the PDP-11without hand-typing
> thousands of lines of MACRO-11 source.  Using a SIMH VAX to do this just
> moves the typing problem around.  It would be nice if I could manually
> construct a tape image on the host system instead of the simulated ones.
>
> DECnetting it would be a bit of overkill, but I'll investigate if I can get
> that working.
> Another possibility would be ... is the specification for ANSI-labelled
> tapes lying around somewhere?  I could hack together a tar-like program to
> build those from outside of the DEC world if the spec is available
> somewhere.
>
>> Message: 2
>> Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:54:50 +0800
>> From: Michael Richter <ttmrichter at gmail.com>
>> Subject: [Simh] Making tape/disk images
>> To: simh <simh at trailing-edge.com>
>> Message-ID:
>> <o2mee970b291004282354xbfdea62dwe8e2b8389f27a5b3 at mail.gmail.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>>
>> Is there an easy way to take a bunch of files and turn them into either a
>> tape image or a disk image suited for attaching to a PDP-11 under SIMH?
>>
>
You might want to look at this:  "Ansitape reads, writes, and creates
magtapes conforming to the ANSI and IBM standard for magtape
labelling. Primarily, this is useful to exchange tapes with VMS and
IBM systems, which make this kind of tape by default."

<http://www.sinenomine.net/products/vm/ansitape>

It has been around in one form or another since the 1980's.  The
source contains enough information to understand the minimum set of
ANSI tape labels, and the program probably could be coerced into
writing files instead of tapes.

    carl
-- 
    carl lowenstein         marine physical lab     u.c. san diego
                                                 clowenstein at ucsd.edu