Just to add some info to the discussion. This sounds like a nice idea, however it will be very difficult to implement on some of the older machines that SimH supports.
For example the B5500 does not have the concept of a mountable pack. Drives could be attached, but they were a permanent attachment. For the Ibm 7000 line, most did not support disk. The disk drive that was supported by many of the machines was a large box that you could not put drives into (IBM 1301/2301). Also these machines all worked in BCD (6 bit), not Ascii. I am also not sure when TOPS10 got support for mounting foreign file systems. I don't believe that 6.03 or 5.03 support this idea. Tapes, paper tapes, and punch cards are probably the most universal format. Also a Paper tape reader is pretty easy to implement, it might be possible to put some kind of header onto the tape to indicate the name of the file. But take a look at how much trouble Kermit does to handle all the various systems. Rich On Wed, 20 Apr 2016 12:14:41 -0400 Paul Koning <paulkon...@comcast.net> wrote: > > On Apr 20, 2016, at 12:06 PM, Sampsa Laine <sam...@mac.com> wrote: > > > > > >> On 20 Apr 2016, at 19:02, Paul Koning <paulkon...@comcast.net> > >> wrote: > >>> > >> > >> I don't know LIF, but the RT-11 file system is certainly simple. > >> > >> There are a couple of complications. First, you'd have to write a > >> file access utility for each guest OS. Given a simple enough file > >> system that isn't necessarily a huge burden. Then again, what > >> might be simple, requiringly only modest code, on one machine > >> might be a major burden on another simply because it has much less > >> memory. > > > > For DEC stuff, Files-11 (level 2?) would probably work across most > > of the OSes. > > No, it would work for VMS, and level 1 at least would work for RSX, > but neither RSTS nor RT11 understand it. And it's a complex file > system, more so than the RSTS one and vastly more than RT11. It does > more, of course, but if you're looking for something that can easily > be ported to another system, this won't do. > > I took the proposal to mean: find a simple OS for which you can > easily implement an application to handle it on most operating > systems. So think something handled by an application like PDP-10 > FLX (or RT-11 FLX), not a file system with native support. > > > ... > >> > >> Paper tape is yet a third option, which is presumably unlabeled > >> but often transparent. (Not always, the 1620 comes to mind as a > >> notorious example of a machine that could read only coded tape > >> with punches conforming to the code it expects.) > > > > That’s a good point but doesn’t make organising files trivial. > > One key question is how important it is to transfer a bunch of files > all at once. Is it sufficient to send one file at a time? With > scripting, that may not be all that problematic. > > paul > > > _______________________________________________ > Simh mailing list > Simh@trailing-edge.com > http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh -- ========================================================================== Richard Cornwell sky...@sky-visions.com http://sky-visions.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-cornwell-991076107 ========================================================================== _______________________________________________ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh