On Wednesday, 07/23/2008 at 11:24 EDT, "Schuh, Richard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Actually, there is no BOT and there is no tape. The vendor chose to > reply like a tape drive to the roll-call for reasons unknown to me. I > speculate that it is because tape units can be written to and read from > in a successive operations. If that is the case, they could have chosen > an old printer that allows one to read the print buffer. And they > respond unconditionally to sense commands as though the device were at > BOT.
Tapes are, IMO, the easiest kind of device to emulate. It's a streaming data programming model, with no annoying pre-defined data structures. (Even though a modern drive has block numbers, those are "just" for fast indexing.) Alan Altmark z/VM Development IBM Endicott
