10 Charsets for CDC machines
What is
now Recode evolved out, through many
transformations really, from a set of programs
which were originally written in
COMPASS, Control Data Corporation's
assembler, with bits in FORTRAN, and later
rewritten in CDC 6000 Pascal. The CDC heritage
shows by the fact some old CDC charsets are still
supported.
The Recode
author used to be familiar with CDC Scope-NOS/BE
and Kronos-NOS, and many CDC formats. Reading CDC
tapes directly on other machines is often a
challenge, and Recode does not always solve it. It
helps having tapes created in coded mode instead of
binary mode, and using S (Stranger)
tapes instead of I (Internal) tapes.
ANSI labels and multi-file tapes might be the
source of trouble. There are ways to handle a few
Cyber Record Manager formats, but some of them
might be quite difficult to decode properly after
the transfer is done.
Recode is
usable only for a small subset of NOS text formats,
and surely not with binary textual formats, like
UPDATE or MODIFY sources,
for example. Recode is not especially suited for
reading 8/12 or 56/60 packing, yet this could
easily arranged if there was a demand for it. It
does not have the ability to translate Display Code
directly, as the ASCII conversion implied by tape
drivers or FTP does the initial approximation.
Recode can decode 6/12 caret notation over Display
Code already mapped to ASCII.
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