While dtCyber was being developed, some tools were written to help facilitate the creation and manipulation of the tape and disk containers. Today, it is more practical to maintain the collection of tools as a single command-line tool. Nearly all functionality has been rewritten into a single command line utility: nosutils

The legacy collection of tools is documented on the Tape and Disk Tools page and they are distributed with the pre-built dtCyber package found on the Utilities page.

This unified compilation is produced for the hobbyist community, with thanks to:

• Gerard J van der Grinten
• Tom Hunter
• Kevin Jordan
• Paul Koning
• and Dale Sinder

… whose initial work informed/inspired the creation of this utility.

The nosutils tool is built to provide the following functions (Details may be found later in this article.):

• Tape Assembly/Disassembly Fully-Functional

  
  This feature “unpacks” a tape file from is internal record format into workstation-based files which may be further modified/manipulated/transformed. Those workstation-based files may then be reconstituted into the .tap (tape file) format using a recipe file as the construction guide.

• Workstation File Conversion (bi-directional) Fully-Functional

  
  Files may be converted from/to any of the following forms:

  • Big-Endian, 60-bit binary
  • Little-Endian, 64-bit binary format files containing representations of the 60-bit CM Word
  • CDC Display Code

    About Display Code Representation

    Data representation in this form is exactly 10 ascii characters per CM Word (6-bit cdc “bytes” = 1 8-bit ascii character). The character set permitted is:

    o00-07 ':',  'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e',  'f', 'g'
    o10-17 'h',  'i', 'j', 'k', 'l', 'm',  'n', 'o'
    o20-27 'p',  'q', 'r', 's', 't', 'u',  'v', 'w'
    o30-37 'x',  'y', 'z', '0', '1', '2',  '3', '4'
    o40-47 '5',  '6', '7', '8', '9', '+',  '-', '*'
    o50-57 '/',  '(', ')', '$', '=', ' ',  ',', '.'
    o60-67 '#',  '[', ']', '%', '"', '_',  '!', '&'
    o70-77 '\'', '?', '<', '>', '@', '\\', '^', ';'

    with upper-case equivalents of the characters 'a' through 'z' being translated to to their lower-case counterparts.

    All other ASCII characters are treated as the cdc representation for 6-bits of zero (as if the character specified was :).

• Catalog Under Development/Incomplete

  
  Attempts to approximate the output of the NOS ITEMIZE command.

• Create Fully-Functional

  
  Enables the 'quick' creation of a tape using workstation-based files as input.

• Dump Fully-Functional

  
  Produces a block-by-block dump of an input tape container.

• Fix Fully-Functional

  
  See the Fix detail page for warnings and details.

• Verify Fully-Functional

  
  Verifies the integrity of the tape container file as well as the expected sequence numbers / checksums for each tape logical block.

• Command Help
• TDisassemble and TAssemble
• File Conversion
• Catalog (Content Listing)
• Create (Simple/Quick)
• Dump (formatted tape dump)
• Fix (rebuild/resequence a tape's content)
• Verify Tape Integrity (TVerify and TVerifyISeq)