[Simh] Announcement: back10

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2017-02-19 09:36, Lars Brinkhoff wrote:
> 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.

With one bit lost... (7*5 == 35)
Maybe I'm missing the point here, but if you want to handle anything 
except 7bit text, then I think this format would fail...

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol