On 14 March 2014 13:49, John McKown <john.archie.mck...@gmail.com> 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?
Decades ago the university I worked at had a standard of Nnnnn and Fnnnn for Native and Foreign tapes, respectively. I don't know why they were all five characters, but surmise that there were occasional historic reasons to have slots labeled with a suffix. Regardless, they are perfectly legal volsers. For some reason many people have insisted to me over the years that not only must tape volsers be all numeric, but that leading zeros will be inferred if not supplied. Both these claims are untrue. The rules for tape volsers are not different from those for disks. > 2) Has any commercial shop ever used non-numeric tape volume serials for > normal in-house tapes? If so, why? Yes - see above. Well, perhaps a university is not commercial in the sense you mean, but we were very much a production shop, and not a nest of developers. > 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). Heh... We were a very early installation of what is now CA's ASM2 archival system. In those days, it used IEHMOVE (cringe) to offload data to tape, and the generated control statements included a full six bytes of tape volser, which predictably IEHMOVE didn't like. Well, not so much didn't like, but treated the characters after the trailing blank as a comment, with at times disastrous results. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
