[HECnet] Slightly OT: DECTape support in SIMH VMS?

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2013-10-03 17:24, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote:

On Sep 29, 2013, at 9:18 AM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:

On 2013-09-29 14:48, Sampsa Laine wrote:
I noticed that the SIMH PDP-11 distribution contains emulation of TC11/TU56 DECtape drives. My questions are:

	- How hard would these be to port to the VAX SIMH emulation?
	- Do modern VMS (e.g > 7.0) OSes support DECtapes?

I figure it would be a nice way to transfer files between a PDP-11 and VAX system for example..

VMS have never supported DECtape, as far as I know   

Not officially.   But I know it was done as a "midnight project", by Andy Goldstein if I remember correctly.   That supposedly even included overlapped seek support, just as TOPS-10 did.

Why am I not surprised he would be involved...

You might just turn it on and see if it works "out of the box".

I would assume the file structure used is the same as what RSX uses, whatever that is.

That would be normal Files-11 in that case. It might be a single directory file structure, though. Like for floppies.

	Johnny