What's magtape good for anyway?

[Tim Shoppa]

> To me (or maybe I just don't know what I'm talking about) it seems
> like magtape has a number of deficiencies:
> 
> No filenames or directory structure:  just an ordered series of 
> bytes.  Which would seem to imply that people must've used tar *a lot*
> to get these services.  True?

Most (non-Unix) minicomputer OS's had built-in support for
ANSI labeled files, which do have filenames (and header bytes to
specify record sizes and number of records).  Folks who used Unix
either made their own labeled tape facility (e.g. Ultrix and
OSF/1 "ltf") or just used "dd" and a lot of hard work.

The lack of a record structure that is built-in to the Unix filesystem
really makes things like tape transfers quite irritating.  The rest of
the world isn't always just a stream of bytes!

Tim. (shoppa at triumf.ca)

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