On Mon, Apr 6, 2020 at 5:00 PM Dennis Boone <drb@msu.edu> wrote:

The tape was made by a PDP-11 system running RT-11. This manual may
help a little:

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp11/rt11/v5.6_Aug91/AA-PD6PA-TC_RT-11_Volume_and_File_Formats_Manual_Aug91.pdf

TL;DR - This tape was written by just copying disk files to it, so the
files which contain actual data are just images of the disk files.

File 2 is a V6 image that's bootable like so

%pdp11

sim> set cpu 11/45

sim> att rk0 2.tape

sim> boot rk0

@rkunnix

File 5 - this looks like a file system image.

It's the rest of the sources from the last disk. You can mount it like so if you add a 'att rk1 5.tape' to the above

# mkdir /rk1

# /etc/mount /dev/rk1 /rk1

File 8 - appears to be some sort of archiver output, but while the .ARC
extension might lead you to suspect the old CP/M - MSDOS ARC program was
responsible, that doesn't appear to be the case.

You'd think that from the name, but you can mount it also like the above. With the 'att rk2 8.tape' and 'att rk3 11.tape'

# chdir /dev

# /etc/mknod rk2 b 0 2

# /etc/mknod rk3 b 0 3

# mkdir /rk2 /rk3

# /etc/mount /dev/rk2 /rk2

# /etc/mount /deev/rk3 /rk3

File 11 - this is an older format tarball.

Nah, somebody else used the disk before for TAR, and then this was overwritten with a unix filesystem.

What's weird is that this is a VENIX system, which should be V7 which should have a different filesystem layout from V6. I'd think I wouldn't be able to see some directories. I'll have to create a V7 system and mount it there...

Warner