[rescue] looking for IBM System/36 software

Nigel Williams nw at retroComputingTasmania.com
Sat Mar 28 18:25:00 CDT 2015


On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 9:57 AM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
> Do you know if these
> are standard 3740-format floppies?  I assume so, but I know the
> System/36 uses 2560-byte blocks, but 20 whole 128-byte sectors will fit
> into 2560 bytes, so they could have made that work if they wanted to.

This thread is where I last dug into this back in 2013:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.sys.ibm.sys3x.misc/8Rs6e0YcHnI

I was able to find "files" on the diskettes but we lacked a precise
description of the VTOC layout to do it reliably, and there are many
record types (for all the on-disk file structures) so
reverse-engineering them will require quite a bit of discovery.

There will be IBM internal documentation on the diskette structure, I
can almost guess the title, but it has yet to be found.


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