John McKown wrote: >1) Has anybody ever had a VOLSER which was not exactly 6 non-blank characters >for a regularly used volume? Especially any trailing blanks?
Not me. Is it possible to have those weird VOLSERs? >2) Has any commercial shop ever used non-numeric tape volume serials for >normal in-house tapes? If so, why? Yes, *if* they have volsers labels in the first place in those years ago when there were round tapes, no SMS, no HSM, no VTS, 3380 DASD, no RACF, only SNA, etc. TAPEMAP was a blessing because the [magnetic] volser does not always match whatever [pen/pencil] volser was written on the stickers... ;-) Reason: datacentres have in those years (pre 1990) swapped tapes for data exchange and any names could do as a volser. Say: BCKUPA, BCKUPB, etc. or NOVAAA (November tape AAA), etc. It also depends on the whims of the owner of that tape(s). There were NO naming standards at all. Duplicate names in a tape vault were a PITA of course. >I ask because, at least historically, CA-1's support of non-number tape >serials was "difficult" (needed some sort of mapping exit as I recall). Yuck! I will cry if I have to maintain that stupid lame exit... ;-D Groete / Greetings Elardus Engelbrecht ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
