Well I’m converting an AWS EBCDIC tape. But I’m not rewinding like I thought. Converting from EBCDIC to ASCII helped lot, to figure out what was happening. I also had the blocking factor wrong. I also wrote to a file…CUSTRC.TXT. Now I need to learn how to control the tape drive. I could open/read/close the file to bypass tape marks. But there must be a more elegant way. I don’t remember how we did it. I guess I should read the label anyway to make sure I have the right tape.
One of my biggest problems in this exercise is having to shutdown/reboot between every test. Otherwise unpredictable things might, and usually does happen. Perhaps it’s just my lack of knowledge of the correct simh commands. For example the afore mentioned “?Error text lookup failure” which led me to have to ungracefully restart RSTS/E.
Here are the 1st few records…
x
CUSTRC.TXT 352 < 60> 01-Jan-99
Total of 2932 blocks in 101 files in SY:[1,2]
Ready
PIP CUSTRC.TXT
1 43138237328344695FMMr Fabian Colin P
etgrave 1999-08-012019-02-19028.701981 NW 514 Pl
Glendale CA91206
2 43137685676264822DMMr Robert Antonio S
chouten DMD 1992-03-142013-02-14049.957458 NE 657 Rd
Mesa AZ85204
3 43132513039894562FM Rodger Drew K
eling 1985-06-282018-09-03032.144970 S 925 Ter
I can confirm they are correct. All the way to rec 1000…the last record!