[Info-vax] DEC BASIC: How to read a sequential

[Paul Sture]

On Sun, 15 Apr 2012 05:02:11 -0700, Neil Rieck wrote:

> On Apr 15, 12:18 am, David Froble <da... at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>>
>> No Basic+ ???
> 
> No, but I do remember one flavor of BASIC (I forget the actual product
> name) which ran on RT-11. What a pain. You needed to buy a license to do
> indexed RMS operations. And when memory got tight, you needed to resort
> to overlays. All that stuff went away with VMS.
 
We had CTS-300 on top of RT-11 which provided indexed, relative and 
sequential file support.  It was nowhere near as comprehensive as RMS in 
its features, but gave us the performance we needed.  For example, 
relative files were simply sequential files with records of a fixed 
length: specify the wrong length on reading record n and you would get 
the wrong offset into the file (and IIRC a short record retrieved).

We used it with DIBOL, and the indexed file creation utility was written 
in that language.

There were a lot of PDPs around without indexed file support.  From folks 
I met on courses I gathered that a lot of them rolled their own indexing 
systems, and there was third party software available.  One of those 
products was known as ACCESS, long before I had heard of the Microsoft 
offering by that name.

-- 
Paul Sture