[HECnet] Reading RT11 files under Windows or Linux

[Clem Cole]

Bob

On Wed, Apr 21, 2021 at 11:06 AM Robert Armstrong <bob at jfcl.com> wrote:

>   Is there a Windows utility that will read and write RT11 files from
> TU58, RX01/2 or RL01/2 images?  A Linux utility would be OK too.
>
After reading your message, I did some mining[1] and unearthed an old
PDP-11 5th/6th edition Unix program[2] called rtpip that we used to use
back in the day to read RK05 disks on our UNIX boxes that we had created
under RT-11.  Note I have not used (or compiled) it since we last ran it on
our 11/60 and 11/70 at Tektronix.     If I recall it had some support for
tapes, in it but we did not have any on common tapes between the RT-11
machines and the Unix boxes, so I have not memory if any of that worked.

It does have a nasty flaw in that it uses the UNIX raw disk interface and
blindly assumes the RK05 is RT-11 format when it's writing the catalog.  In
fact, this is the program I used to famously wipe out Fred Park's life work
one afternoon as the 0 and 1 keys were next to each other on one of the Tek
keyboards and I hit the wrong one....

That said, it's really simple code, so if you were to do a 'sed script'
changing of 'int' and 'register' to 'short' and then add function
prototypes for all the functions, I bet getting it to compile would not be
a huge issue.  You might have look at some things like stat(2) and seek(2)
which changed, but I would expect it to be pretty straightforward [frankly
moving the man page to modern format is probably more work than the C code
itself].

Send me an email offline, and I can make it available.

Clem

1] I was recently looking for something else and thought I had seen it
among some old CMU/Tektronix stuff [did not find what I was looking for on
that crawl but ...]

2.] So the code is really old ... i.e. pre-K&R (White Book/Typesetter C *etc
-- *no stdio - just read/write) as Dennis wrote the white book using V6 and
it described the compiler that was released at that time we all tend to
call 'Typesetter C' - which was the first edition of stdio [or as it was
called then libS.a].


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