System/36 whining and begging...

From: Colin Eby <ceby2_at_csc.com>
Date: Sun Jan 26 12:34:00 2003

Folks --

Thought I'd continue my unreasonable begging from the previous note back to
Bill. I'd like to take on a little project of creating archival images of
S/36 media. I've made a duplicate of most of what I own on fresher 8"
stock. But I don't think that's a long term strategy for avoiding the
inevitable ravages of media corruption. What I had in mind was something
like a 'dd' dump of each disk that could be reloaded to fresh 8" media when
required. I haven't given this too much thought so bear with me.... I'm
working on a list of questions and puzzles to accomplish this goal.The
first obvious problem is media to hardware integration. If memory serves, I
read somewhere that IBM used an oddball disk format (Sellam, you might know
this). 8" Shuggart drives come on the market from time to time but, would
they, using low level drivers, be able to make a physical block by block
copy of IBM S/36 disk data? The second problem is hardware to hardware
integration. Has anyone had luck integrating a 8" drive with a more recent
machine? And what are the alternatives? I presume this could be done on DEC
hardware and then sent to any open platform over a network connection. Has
anyone gotten an 8" floppy operating under an Intel based Linux host. That
would seem the obvious media transfer station because of the wide range of
hardware compatibility. Once these first two steps are done, any basic disk
utility ought to make short work of creating binary dumps.

An alternative approach might be to copy the disks directly on the
System/36 host using platform native tools then sending the file across
some form of network connection. The problem is I haven't a clue how that
would need to be done. I've never read any low level API for S/36 as a
platform. IBM seems to have kept anything harware layer proprietary.

Any and all thoughts welcome. Thanks,
-Colin

ceby2_at_csc.com
Senior Consultant,
National Performance Engineeering Practice
CSC Consulting.
Received on Sun Jan 26 2003 - 12:34:00 GMT