Perhaps the work could be split up: reading the track waveforms is the one step
that requires special hardware (and the skill to handle the tape with minimal
damage). Given a collection of recovered waveforms, the data recovery can then
be done by anyone.
paul
> On Aug 5, 2021, at 8:39 AM, Jay Jaeger via cctech <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> I know Paul well (we were contemporaries at U. WI). He does not do that very
> often. He did not indicate any issue with a fire at the building that
> contains his collection when I last spoke with him.
>
> He does not actually read "blocks". He reads the tape in an *analog*
> fashion, and then processes the results with software. That is how he
> recovered the IBM 1410 system tapes and diagnostics, for example.
>
> To be honest, I doubt that this content would be such that he would be likely
> to volunteer.
>
> JRJ
>
> On 8/4/2021 3:11 PM, Van Snyder wrote:
>> Paul Pierce <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> read some 7-track
>> and 9-track tapes for me about twenty years ago. He was in Portland, OR at
>> the time. His "lab" was on the east side of the Willamette river, so maybe
>> it didn't get burned down.
>> I don't know whether he still has a setup to read tapes. His software would
>> read blocks forward and backward, including the parity frames, and make
>> corrections.
>> Van Snyder
>> On Wed, 2021-08-04 at 09:25 -0500, Jay Jaeger via cctech 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.
>>>
>>> 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).
>>>
>>> So, if you haven't found somebody to read this thing yet, feel free to
>>> contact me.
>>>
>>> JRJ
>>>
>>> On 8/2/2021 10:11 AM, James Liu via cctech wrote:
>>>> 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
>>>> <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
>>>>
