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Aucbvax.5449 fa.info-vax utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!info-vax Fri Dec 11 18:38:56 1981 IBM tape >From alice!ark@Berkeley Fri Dec 11 18:32:24 1981

In reply to the message from "Lars.Ericson@CMU-10A": a tape that is described by "DCB=(LRECL=80,RECFM=FB,BLKSIZE=3920)" is in the following format: It is probably in EBCDIC, presumably written by an IBM system. The data should be considered to be divided into logical records of exactly 80 characters each. These logical records are collected into blocks (physical records), each containing an integral number of logical records, with no delimiters other than the known length of a logical record. No block is longer than 3920 bytes, hence 49 logical records. If the tape is labelled by IBM standards (likely), the first file will be a header label, the second file will be data, the third file will be a trailer label, and so on. In other words, data reside on files numbered 2, 5, 8, ... The whole tape ends with two tape marks in a row.

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