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Re: Writing / reading text files with tapes

 

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Thanks for posting that link to the homerow site. ?The precompiled vma and vmagui utilities work excellently on my Win10 system.

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I contributed code changes many years ago to the assembler implementation of VMARC maintained by Ross Paterson after he took over from John Fischer (the original author) to allow it to run on VM/370 under Herc.? I went searching for Ross Paterson¡¯s geocities site, which is sadly only available at the oocities archive site now.

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The ¡°full download¡± of the VMARC assembler implementation is still available on that archive in base64 format.

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On Win10 systems you can use the builtin certutil command to convert the base64 text to a file usable with the vma or vmagui utilities.

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C:\VMARC>certutil -decode vmarc.txt vmarc.vma

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I think the linux base64 command will do the same conversion for you but I didn¡¯t try it myself yet.

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I haven¡¯t looked, but I would assume the VM/370 six-pack system already includes this code, but it is nice to know the original is still available for reference.

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Peter

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From: [email protected] <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Steven Fosdick
Sent: Saturday, February 1, 2020 4:40 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [h390-vm] Writing / reading text files with tapes

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On Fri, 31 Jan 2020 at 23:46, Peter Coghlan <groups@...> wrote:

VMA is available as C source which can be compiled on any reasonable system
with a functioning C compiler.? I have compiled it on my OpenVMS system, I
think most others use it on Windows or Linux.? The purpose of VMA is to
read write and list VMARC format archive files on systems other than VM/CMS.

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Thanks to Ren¨¦ for e-mailing me a link to a video that describes searching for the source with "vma utility homerow" which leads to

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I did try searching before to find a portable implementation of the amarc format but even hearing the utility is called vma didn't seem?to be enough to find it.


> The previous discussion may have been the one I started - I was able to get
> IND$FILE working and also send files to the real punch but I think the
> current question is more about being able to transfer a number of files at
> a time,

I think VMARC is ideal for this purpose but we seem to keep heading off in
the direction of emulated tapes or newly invented archive formats both of
which I think are not so ideal.

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I think it's quite common to start to solve a problem yourself, get to a point where you're stuck and ask for help on the thing your stuck on.? Helping you with that specific point can lead to a solution but sometimes, if someone persuades you to rewind to the problem you started out with it turns out there is a better solution.?

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