[Info-vax] COBOL and EBCDIC tapes Was: AlphaVM-free emulator with all

[Bob Koehler]

In article <cnaqe9-3b5.ln1 at news1.chingola.ch>, Paul Sture <paul at sture.ch> writes:
>> 
> 
> I should have said VAX/DEC/Compaq/HP COBOL there.  It worked for all the 
> IBM tapes I came across but IIRC if push came to shove you could define 
> your own alphabet.  You mounted the tapes /FOREIGN and the labels were 
> ANSI standard (as documented in the VMS I/O User Guide, so no need to 
> reach for IBM documentation).  Retrieving the block and record lengths 
> from those headers gave you the necessary information to unpack into RMS 
> records.

   ANSI standard tape labels and IBM SL labels at one time differed in
   content only in ANSI labels being in ASCII and IBM SL being in EBCDIC.

   Or IBM could also write tapes in ASCII with ANSI labels, but
   disargeed with VMS on the maining of the EOV label.

   The IBM always ended tapes with EOV labels.  VMS took the presence of
   and EOV label to mean the data continued on another physical tape.