Tape labelling

[Jordan Brown]

NO, no, no, no mandatory tape labelling.  I've received dozens of random
tapes, and only a few of them were ANSI standard.  (In fact, the ANSI std
ones were the hardest to read because they were the most complex format.
Perhaps this was an artifact of the VMS system that produced them, not
ANSI, but it was terrible)  I would receive a tape, often with no (or
incorrect!) information on format and character set, and have to use
low-level tape dump programs to determine what format they were in.
With mandatory tape labelling I would be unable to read even the simplest
of "foreign" formats.  (When you're on a SEL 32/55, *everything* is foreign!)

Tape labelling and standard tape formats are wonderful, as long as they
aren't mandatory.  Eventually, maybe.  But for now, many people believe that
the most portable tape format is unlabelled 80 byte card image blocked about
10 to the physical record, flip a coin for character set.

Does somebody out there have a program which reads ANSI tapes that they could
send me?  Writes?

jordan