[HECnet] Funky file formats, et al...

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2013-01-02 00:37, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote:

On Jan 1, 2013, at 10:25 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:

On 2012-12-31 19:36, Bob Armstrong wrote:
    There   s something else going on here.   I   m not sure who originally
analyzed the file to decide that the format was Stream-CR (although
given that the analysis was done on RSX, we can probably guess :-)

Cool. This is become more weird all the time.
WHat I reported was what was shown when doing a directory over DECnet. It's the information VMS presents. RSX is not really involved.

With DECnet, it is.   DAP sends the information about the files in the directory listing in encoded form, and it's up to the receiving system to decode it correctly and format it for display.   So if you're seeing the wrong attribute, either VMS is sending the wrong DAP code, or RSX is decoding it wrong.   A wire trace along with some reading of the DAP protocol spec will tell you which it is.

Thanks, Paul. I have not read the spec. But I came to realize this after looking at this for a while, and being wrong a couple of times.

I think it's fair to use VMS as a reference implementation, since VmS agrees with itself. So I'm going to look at fixing RSX.
Does anyone have an RSTS/E system (or TOPS-20), and could report how the file appears to be, from their point of view?

LEGATO::INFO.TXT;1 is what I'm thinking of.

	Johnny