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From: woolsey@netcom.COM (Jeff Woolsey)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.cdc
Subject: Re: Reading a CDC tape on a unix system
Keywords: CDC, unix, 9-track tape
Message-ID: <1991May1.012240.11942@netcom.COM>
Date: 1 May 91 01:22:40 GMT
References: <3134@sparko.gwu.edu>
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In article <3134@sparko.gwu.edu> dave@seas.gwu.edu (David M. Owczarek) writes:
>I recently was asked if I could read two CDC tapes on our systems here.

The hardware you listed is capable of it.  The software, however....

CDC machines could be told to write tapes that other machines were
likely to be able to read (such as blocked formats).  If the user
didn't take the trouble to write such formats, you got CDC
internal-format tapes.

The former, anybody can read.  The latter, I can read.
I can do just about anything with CDC-written tapes on Suns, provided
the tapes are old enough.  If they're new, you don't need me.

"Anything" includes cataloging the files there, reading the data,
unpacking archives, unpacking dumps, extracting "decks" from program
libraries, itemizing these things, converting text to ASCII, and even
executing some of the binary programs.

The code (not quite ready for release) to do all this is written in
Modula-3, though there is some basic tape-reading stuff in C still
hanging around.
-- 
-- 
Jeff Woolsey	Microtec Research, Inc	+1 408 980-1300
woolsey@netcom.COM	...!amdcad!sun0!woolsey