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

[Paul Sture]

On Thu, 02 Aug 2012 08:34:06 -0500, Bob Koehler wrote:

> 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.

As I wrote that post I realised I couldn't remember whether the labels 
themselves were in ASCII or EBCDIC.  I don't recall coming across 
multivolume tapes but what you say does ring a bell.

-- 
Paul Sture