10 Jan
2026
10 Jan
'26
11:51 p.m.
??
That's /very/ interesting. We had given a number of things to DECUS,
but I was unable to get through it all what I've found and I wonder if
even most of it. I think not.
What I wanted to do was build a DECUS pack and restore at least all the
Tops-20 files I could, Tops-10 and everything else depending on how much
disk space I could fit it. These save sets are from one of the last
20's on the Internet, whose name is famous and which I now (of course)
forget.
One of the issues that I ran into is that the build formats for DLUSER
(which is what one users for preconstructing a directory tree prior to
restoring from tape), did not work. What is from DECUS is not
compatible with Tops-20 version 7, so I would imagine that this is a
late version 6.
DLUSER has an undocumented positional format using raw binary. So if you
have something in the wrong position as what appears to be the case, you
will get complete junk for directories. It's far more efficient than a
tagged format like XML, but you just can't figure out what is going on
without a debugger and the source code.
It was on my list of things to do, I'll see if I can't scare up V-SP-14.
On 1/10/26 5:05 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
The readme file there says that it was written to be
compatible with
the "Columbia Finger System (DECUS Library V-SP-14)