Thread context
4 posts in path
Root
@philcowans@universeodon.com
Open
@philcowans@universeodon.com
One thing I haven't got my head around yet is memory management. I previously assumed that there was no support for virtual memory at all, but I'm not sure that's the case - I've now seen a paper whic
Ancestor 2
@philcowans@universeodon.com
Open
@philcowans@universeodon.com
The second thing I've been doing is trying to figure out how ARCHIV (roughly equivalent to 'tar') works and therefore how to interpret the file format. This is the file format for most of the preserve
Parent
@philcowans@universeodon.com
Open
@philcowans@universeodon.com
The earlier version is from 1968. The key thing is the format of the 'super line mark', which is the separator between the various files in the archive. The 1968 version has the following comment desc
Phil
@philcowans@universeodon.com
Entrepreneurship, machine learning, computer science, web technologies, climate change, politics, running, music.
universeodon.com
Phil
@philcowans@universeodon.com
Entrepreneurship, machine learning, computer science, web technologies, climate change, politics, running, music.
universeodon.com
@philcowans@universeodon.com
·
Jan 30, 2026
The later version is from 1970, and the comment has changed to:
THE FORMAT OF 'SUPER LINE MARK' IN ASCII ARCHIV FILES
IS DEFINED AS FOLLOWS:
FF NL NL NL DEL DEL DEL DEL
NAME1 SP SP NAME2 SP SP MM/DD/YY SP SP
HHMM.M SP SP ZZZZZZ DEL DEL DEL DEL NL NL NL NL
TOTALLING 14 WORDS. ZZZZZZ IS THE WORD COUNT.
So by now we've switched to #ASCII. From the code, NL is what is now called LF. The code also implies that ASCII is internally represented with 9 bits (i.e. 3 octal digits), so 4 characters per 36 bit word.
6/n
#CTSS #retrocomputing #IBM7094
View full thread on universeodon.com
