This was a fun trip down memory lane, I remember the Overland device. And if memory servers me correctly you had to load the tape through the mechanism manually, there was at least the ne I tried in the early 90's no autoloader. Why could this be important is because the most likely error these types of tapes will see is edge damage making the not readable. And every time a human hand touches, they the chances go up. Last Time I spoke with anyone about 3420 tapes was back around 2010 and they had a number of tapes that for any reason "Could Not be Scratched". Their solution was to hand the tapes to the person making that statement and saying they will not be scratched because they are in your possession. I thought it was a great solution to the issue. The likelihood of reading these tapes in my opinion is very low, they have passed their shelf life.
Carl Swanson Mobile:215.688.1459 Email: [email protected] -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin Sent: Sunday, June 6, 2021 12:21 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [External] Re: access to 9-track reel tape drive On Sun, 6 Jun 2021 05:54:17 +0000, Seymour J Metz wrote: >Presumably he's saying that nobody in his right mind would simply copy the >data on the tape to a byte stream, and that the most obvious way to archive >the tape is to convert it to AWSTAPE format. Once it's in AWSTAPE format, then >it's simple to read it under Hercules, assuming that the labels and records >follow OS/360 conventions. > Amen. Joe Monk's and Radoslaw's comments appear well-informed. And with 9-track I believe there's no need to deal with the abomination of even parity. ( knew an old CDC OS that relied on the difference to discern filetypes, even replicating the behavior in DASD files.) It's a pity there's no facility to process AWSTAPE directly with no need for a step to convert to virtual or real 3480. Subsystem? ISV? Or to generate AWSTAPE on Linux, MacOS, or Windows. Does a dump of the first block say "VOL1"? If the OP believes the tapes contain useful data he probably knows which utility can process the restored images. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
