Post #186628

2026-01-30 15:59 UTC

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

Replies (1)

@philcowans@universeodon.com 2026-01-30 16:05

Unifortunately, the actual archive files I have (which are modern ASCII files) use neither of these conventions, and instead have 4 blank lines (CR LF termination) followed by something like: AARCHV BCD 10/04/70 1545.9 42312 00000 The fields are identifiable, apart from the 00000, which doesn't appear in the source code, however, assuming the 42312 is a word count, I'm really struggling to relate that in any meaningful way to the actual length of the following file (as identified by scanning for the next super line mark). There's a good chance that the files I have have been processed in unknown ways since they were written by the original machine, but I would like to have a complete understanding. As an aside there are also page and section headers in the file, and I'm not sure whether these are part of the ARCHIV format or from the original files. I'm going to have to park this for now, but will investigate when I next have some time. 7/7 #CTSS #retrocomputing #IBM7094

Open ##186687