Re: Help reading a 9 track tape
On Wed, Aug 4, 2021 at 10:25 AM Jay Jaeger wrote: > > James, I am located in Madison WI. I would need to fire up my SCSI 9 > Track drive (software on Linux) and test it as I have not used in a > couple of years, but I have done recovery of old tapes from this era > before, and have a primitive setup for "baking" tapes before trying to > read them. > > Assuming my HP 9 track is still happy, I can produce AWS format tape > images, raw block files and extract individual files (translated into > ASCII if that is desirable). > > I don't remember exactly the time period when tape coatings were such > that reading them without "baking" them is very risky - this might be > before that era - Al Kossow would probably know - so I'd likely "bake" > it first before trying to read it. Thanks, Jay (and others) for offering your assistance. I've asked Chuck to have a look at the tape, and we'll see how it goes. > Given the name "IEBUPDTX" this tape was certainly intended to be used on > a 360 or 370, as you described below (IBM has a utility IEBUPDTE). I can't say I know much about IBM systems, but apparently Strubbe, who was doing the port and who I got the tape from, was no fan of IEBUPDTE. I wonder if IEBUPDTX was his attempt at an improvement. As for CDC Schoonschip, old reports indicate that it consisted of about 25k lines of COMPASS code along with 1k lines of FORTRAN for handling I/O. At the time (1960's), Tini may have been right about making the most of the hardware, especially memory limitations, by coding in assembly. For example, I think Schoonschip packed a lot of data into bitfields which FORTRAN may not be so adept at handling. However I think he hung on to this sort of "high level languages cripple the computer" mentality for too long. Then again, he was quite the character. Stephen Wolfram has some interesting musings on Schoonschip at https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/01/tini-veltman-1931-2021-from-assembly-language-to-a-nobel-prize/ > So, if you haven't found somebody to read this thing yet, feel free to > contact me. > > JRJ > - jim -- James T. Liu, Professor of Physics 3409 Randall Laboratory, 450 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1040 Tel: 734 763-4314Fax: 734 763-2213Email: jim...@umich.edu
Re: Help reading a 9 track tape
Thanks for feedback and offers to assist. I received the tape from one of the maintainers of Schoonship at CERN, and it was probably made around 1978 at SLAC. For some background, Tini Veltman developed Schoonship in the 1960's at CERN on the CDC 6600. My understanding is that he more or less insisted on coding in assembly since he thought FORTRAN or other high level languages would just get in the way and slow things down. The code was maintained by Veltman and Strubbe well into the 1970's, but its future was held back by being so closely tied to CDC hardware. In the mid 1970's, Strubbe began a conversion of Schoonschip to IBM S/360 and S/370. It was sort of a curious technique, as far as I gathered. The idea was to first translate CDC COMPASS source to an intermediate PL/I like language. But then, instead of using the IBM PL/I compiler, a bunch of macros were developed to implement the PL/I like language in IBM assembly. This conversion was never fully completed for reasons unknown to me. Later on, when Tini joined the University of Michigan (that's where I'm located), he realized that Schoonschip needed to be updated. But the update was ... instead of CDC assembly he decided on m68k assembly. (At this time, in the early 1980's, C probably would have been the natural language of choice.) Moreover, he insisted on developing his own toolchain (assembler, linker, etc). This was before my time at Michigan, but basically he ported Schoonschip to just about all the m68k machines of that era (Sun, Atari, Amiga, Mac, NeXT, and others I am not familiar with). We have a pretty good collection of m68k code (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~williams/Vsys/index.html), but nothing earlier. Getting back to the tape, I'm pretty sure it has Strubbe's PL/I like code as it is an archive of the PL/I conversion. It may also have CDC source, but that is less obvious until we can see the contents. The CDC source is historically the most relevant, and I am hoping it exists on the tape. - jim -- James T. Liu, Professor of Physics 3409 Randall Laboratory, 450 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1040 Tel: 734 763-4314Fax: 734 763-2213Email: jim...@umich.edu
Help reading a 9 track tape
Hi, I have been lurking for a few years, but thought I'd finally speak up as I just received a 9 track tape purportedly containing the source code to Schoonschip (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schoonschip). This is a 2400' reel recorded at 1600 bpi based on the labels, and a cursory examination suggests that it is still in pretty good shape (although I am not sure how it was stored over the years). Here is a picture of the tape: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JgY8QdVDchxubUz39jYn86gEczSvFhcZ/view?usp=sharing We no longer have any equipment that can read the tape, so I was wondering if anyone may be willing to help or if anyone had suggestions on where to go to get it read. Thanks! - jim -- James T. Liu, Professor of Physics 3409 Randall Laboratory, 450 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1040 Tel: 734 763-4314Fax: 734 763-2213Email: jim...@umich.edu
