[Simh] Announcement: back10

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Rich Alderson wrote:
> Lars Brinkhoff wrote:
>> If there's one thing I'd wish for, it would be for a standard
>> encoding of binary 36-bit data into octets.  FTP uses high density
>> format.  Magtapes use core dump format.  ITS files and itstar use the
>> evacuate format.  Then there's the ANSI-ASCII/KERMIT-36 5x7+1 format.
>> Let's not bring up disk images or 7-track and paper tapes.
>
> Personally, I'd vote for coredump format, as it's the common
> denominator among Tops-10 and its derivatives (SAIL's WAITS,
> Tymshare's TYMCOM-X, the CIS monitor) and TOPS-20, with utilities to
> convert into the others if necessary (which it rarely is).

If we're casting votes, I'd put mine on ASCII-ANSI.  Because:

- PDP-10 7-bit ASCII files are transformed into 8-bit ASCII files.
- It's simple.
- Words are always encoded into 5 octets.

Of course core dump shares the last two properties, but not the first.
I think it's great to be able to read text files without running them
through an additional conversion step.