That's a restriction of 16 heads in some circumstances.

But the IEBCOPY says/implies they are complying with an
apparent restriction that causes a 256 head limitation.

BFN. Paul.




On Mon, 25 Aug 2025 21:44:13 -0500, Mike Schwab <[email protected]> wrote:

>For normal volumes, CCHHR where each letter is 8 bits.
>For EAV volumes this is defined to x'ccccCCChrr'' where each letter is 4
>bits.
>rr = x'00'- x'FF'
>H 'x'0' - x'e' (since 3390s have 15 heads).
>CCCcccc is the cylinder number,
>with CCC=x'000' (non-eav 1 to 64K cylinders 56GB)
>to 00F (800GB EAV) and the cccc is x'0000' - x'ffff'' 0 to 64K tracks
>
>On Mon, Aug 25, 2025 at 7:44 PM Paul Edwards <
>[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> I am interested in the "artificial device" described on page 330 here:
>>
>> https://publib.boulder.ibm.com/epubs/pdf/dgt2u140.pdf
>>
>> (for use by iebcopy).
>>
>> I am actually interested in PDSes, not PDSE, but I would
>> expect that an artificial device is the same either way, and
>> that I could use it for a PDS too.
>>
>> It is defined as:
>>
>> 65536 cylinders
>> 256 tracks (heads)
>> and the tracks are 16M bytes, which means that regardless
>> of the blocksize, you can fit 255 records in it.
>>
>> According to that page, it is subject to limits described here:
>>
>> https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/SSLTBW_3.1.0/pdf/idad400_v3r1.pdf
>>
>> But I'm not sure which page is relevant.
>>
>> I see limits on page number 41, but that's 16 MB for a single disk.
>>
>> This artificial machine can do that in a single track!
>>
>> What I'm interested in is why the number of heads is limited to 256.
>>
>> I normally see CCHHR - so that should mean 65536 heads, the
>> same limit as the cylinders.
>>
>> Any idea why the heads on an artificial machine are only 256,
>> and whether that is documented as suggested by page 330
>> of the first manual?
>>
>> Thanks. Paul.
>>
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>
>
>-- 
>Mike A Schwab, Springfield IL USA
>Where do Forest Rangers go to get away from it all?
>
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