Hi Folks,
It just occurred to me after having a discussion with a fellow
sysprog that most of us have old tapes and cartridges lying around
(collecting dust) which have potential usefulness if they'd be converted
to DVDs or CD roms and put into AWS format. The technology is certainly
available for that, and it's a lot easier to store (say) 2 DVDs than 20
or 25 carts (or 2400 foot reels).
Many of us, who were hoarding old tapes, not knowing what would be
done with them, of course never anticipated that you can run MVS on a
PC. (And you LEGALLY can run 1975-vintage MVS 3.8 at home.)
So even if you think your old tapes aren't useful, you can make them
useful to SOMEBODY, and the other side is, that CDs and DVDs take up a
whole lot less space than tapes do. And also, you can make duplicates
of CDs and DVDs much more easily, so they can be saved for longer.
I wanted to put this idea out to the public, because people often
don't think of that. Since I do a lot of software archiving (being the
co-proprietor of the CBT Tape collection), I have a tendency to think
along those lines.
Anyway, if anybody is interested, please say something. This idea
can be a bigger boon to us MVS people than anybody anticipated. The
technology to do Tape to AWS or TAPE to FakeTape (TM) conversions on an
MVS system, can be found on CBT Tape File 533. Go to www.cbttape.org.
More recent stuff is on the Updates page, so look at the Updates page
first. Then, look at the CBT page.
All the best.......
Sincerely, Sam Golob
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