[Simh] Transferring the licence file to the VAX emulator

[Clem Cole]

The problem is the license manager code you are running into is expecting
an RMS file, not a Stream I/O.  In the old days, the idea of 'access
methods' was the natural ways OS's did I/O and RMS was VMS's answer.
 Since today's programmers tend to have grown up with C/C++/Java and stream
I/O, you need to think in terms of a programming 'Framework' that is
inflicting some level structure on the file.  FWIW: Stream style I/O and
the STREAM-LF file format was added to VMS to support VAX11/C, and normal
programmers (correctly) started to avoid RMS (it was funny how quickly the
compiler runtime teams abandoned RMS, but I digress).  But if the code was
written assuming RMS (which was all VMS had for many years), the files need
RMS.

[As my old friend and officemate Tom Teixera once said so wisely, it was
not so bad that RMS had thousands of options, but the OS had to check every
one of them on each operation].

Anyway, if you can, you might try:  dir/full filespec command on another
license file, looking at 'Record format' and 'Record attributes' fields  in
the results to give you a hint.

On Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 10:18 AM dave porter <dave_list_addr at verizon.net>
wrote:

>
> Probably nothing. The 'natural' format would have been
> RMS VAR-CR records (if I recall the terminology) where
> the line termination character is implicit rather than
> being in the record data.
>
Pulling very old bits from the my brain's 'deep-freeze' memory, that sounds
close - 'RMS VAR records',  if the 'format' is 'Variable Length' I believe
that there was originally a of 255 IIRC, becauses it stuffs a Pascal String
(IBM 360 style) one byte record length before start of the data, but that
may have been relaxed in later versions after I stopped dealing with VMS.
If 'attributes' is 'Carriage return' then RMS will add the <CR><LF> from
earlier DEC OS's output, although it will not store them on disk like some
systems did.

>
> STREAM-LF may work, but I assume the trick is to get
> the record-type for the file to match what you've put
> in the file.
>

Check out http://neilrieck.net/docs/openvms_notes_text_files.html




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