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

[dott.Piergiorgio d' Errico]

Il 21/03/2013 14:55, Armistead, Jason ha scritto:
> 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.

I have reported, and was discussed here, the issues with PDP-4/7 DECsys, 
whose is rooted in the partial emulation of the DECTape formatting; In 
more recent time, I have haved little time to fool with SIMH, so I guess 
that a .txt or .odt shared "Notebook of SIMH" can be a good idea.

oh, and about the issues with ex and de, e.g. Librascope emulation ?

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.