[Simh] Formally documenting PDP tape drive behavior (and other facets of SIMH and the systems it emulates)

[Armistead, Jason]

There has been a lot of interesting discussion about tape drives on PDP systems in the last week or so.  It's great to hear those familiar with the inner workings of these devices, or with access to the manuals, share their wisdom.

One question though - after the "old timers" are gone, would a newbie to SIMH be able to figure these same things out ?

Or, in other words, do the accompanying comments in the code and the SIMH documentation adequately capture the "nuggets" of the conversations that take place on this list ?  And do we provide enough in the way of "breadcrumbs" to allow a newbie to re-discover this same information ?

Capturing this knowledge is a hard thing to do, and with retrocomputing we are presently at a point in time where we can still rely on folks who designed, built, tested, operated and programmed these systems, and in some cases they still even have running systems available for experimentation and measurement.  But what happens when that is no longer the case ?

Just food for thought ... let's make sure SIMH and its fellow emulators like MAME / MESS can still be enjoyed and understood by future generations.


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