[Simh] Way out idea for simh

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2016-04-21 12:31, Davis Johnson wrote:
> I haven't heard any mention of ANSI labeled tapes as a data format. OS
> support varies, and interpretation of the standard varies perhaps even
> more.

Right. But it's still a standard, which is a good start.

> I never liked them much (I never had good tools for them on my real
> hardware). In theory it should be a reasonable common format.

Yes. But here again we hit problems pretty soon. The ANSI labelled tapes 
means you can have files, and the files consist of records. But that is 
all. How should these files be interpreted? Are they text? Binary data? 
What should we do with binary data? Different systems might store 
additional data to answer these questions, but then we get into system 
dependent bits, which are not in the standards, and differ from one 
system to the next.

We're no closer to a solution. But we've added a bunch of subsystems 
that people will be guaranteed to mess up.

	Johnny