[Simh] VAX Tape Emulation?

[Phil Budne]

Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
> This is obviously a limitation of the rmt protocol, which makes the 
> assumption that all records are of equal length. Works for the standard 
> Unix tools, which also tend to want to use tapes with a fixed record length.

>From the FreeBSD 10.3 rmt(8) man page:

     ..... The protocol is comprised of the following commands,
     which are sent as indicated - no spaces are supplied between the command
     and its arguments, or between its arguments, and `\n' indicates that a
     newline should be supplied:
......

     Wcount\n
             Write data onto the open device.  The rmt utility reads count
             bytes from the connection, aborting if a premature end-of-file is
             encountered.  The response value is that returned from the
             write(2) call.

So each write to the tape can have a different record length.

All this reminds me how happy I am not to deal with tape drives any
more!  I can't remember how many times I issued "mt fsf" without an
"&" not remembering the operation made the process incorruptible, and
resistant to CTRL-Z.

I always said tape drivers and boot roms always sucked because once
you got them working, you didn't want to touch them again!