From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: will.senn@gmail.com (Will Senn) Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2017 15:26:55 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] Determining what was on a tape back in the day In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 11/18/17 12:57 PM, Clem Cole wrote: > A quick look, and I think it's an stp (super TP) tape -- stp is from > the Harvard distribution.   This would make sense, because that was > the standard back before tar. > As Ron pointed out, tp (which Ken designed for DECTapes originally) > puts the index at the head of the tape (tar and later cpis threaded > the index inline).   But it means its a fixed size and there were some > other issues (tp may have originally been in assembler IIRC).   On > DECtape, tp worked pretty well/was pretty cool because you could > update a block, less so on 9-track which when you re-wrote block N, > you lost all blocks afterwards.  Also, I don't remember why now > [probably the limits off the directory], but it was typically in those > days to take all the files in a directory, turn them into a foo.a (ar > format) archive.  So the stp image was a bunch of files: dir1/mumble.a >  dir2/grumble.a dir3/bumble.a ... > You then needed to unarchive the files within each directory.   Also, > remember ar(1) when through some changes in format between 4-7th > editions as the compiler and linker matured.  So watch out on that > front too... > > Anyway, v6 tp probably will read it, but if you poke around the TUHS > and bitkeeper archives for the original Harvard distribution, stp.c > should exist. > I'll look around. v6 tp was able to read the tape: set tc en att tc0 unix6.dat c # chdir /usr/6 # tp t0 speakez/sbrk.s dcheck.c ... the directories don't get created on extract, but that's typical on v6. Will -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: