[Simh] Way out idea for simh

[Paul Koning]

> On Apr 20, 2016, at 12:06 PM, Sampsa Laine <sampsa at mac.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On 20 Apr 2016, at 19:02, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> I don't know LIF, but the RT-11 file system is certainly simple.
>> 
>> There are a couple of complications.  First, you'd have to write a file access utility for each guest OS.  Given a simple enough file system that isn't necessarily a huge burden.  Then again, what might be simple, requiringly only modest code, on one machine might be a major burden on another simply because it has much less memory.
>> 
> 
> For DEC stuff, Files-11 (level 2?) would probably work across most of the OSes.

No, it would work for VMS, and level 1 at least would work for RSX, but neither RSTS nor RT11 understand it.  And it's a complex file system, more so than the RSTS one and vastly more than RT11.  It does more, of course, but if you're looking for something that can easily be ported to another system, this won't do.

I took the proposal to mean: find a simple OS for which you can easily implement an application to handle it on most operating systems.  So think something handled by an application like PDP-10 FLX (or RT-11 FLX), not a file system with native support.

> ...
>> 
>> Paper tape is yet a third option, which is presumably unlabeled but often transparent. (Not always, the 1620 comes to mind as a notorious example of a machine that could read only coded tape with punches conforming to the code it expects.)
> 
> That’s a good point but doesn’t make organising files trivial.

One key question is how important it is to transfer a bunch of files all at once.  Is it sufficient to send one file at a time?  With scripting, that may not be all that problematic.

	paul