Call for information on virtual tape formats 356

I think that you'll find that in many cases tape drives will read the short records if everything goes well, but if anything hiccups and the system goes into error recovery the short records will be dismissed as noise.

We had that problem at a PPOE: the University had a rule that any computer purchase had to be coordinated by a campus-wide office. The bookstore did an end run around the rules by purchasing an "electronic cash register system" -- even though the system included a computer and a tape drive on which the transactions were recorded. The idea was that the tape would then be read on our S-360 and uploaded into the University's financial database.

All fine and dandy...except that the idjuts who wrote the code on the "electronic cash register system" in numerous situations would deliberately generate one-byte records, and with the tape drive located in a corner of the bookstore manager's office the quality of the tape wasn't particularly good...meaning that ERP was frequently invoked when the tape was being read.

Lots of effort was spent by the administrative programmers (thankfully, not my responsibility) to build workarounds to handle the loss of the short records.

Joe Morris