What is now recode evolved out, through many transformations
really, from a set of programs which were originally written in
COMPASS, Control Data Corporation's assembler, with bits in FORTRAN,
and later rewritten in CDC 6000 Pascal. The CDC heritage shows by the
fact some old CDC charsets are still supported.
The recode author used to be familiar with CDC Scope-NOS/BE and
Kronos-NOS, and many CDC formats. Reading CDC tapes directly on other
machines is often a challenge, and recode does not always solve
it. It helps having tapes created in coded mode instead of binary mode,
and using S (Stranger) tapes instead of I (Internal) tapes.
ANSI labels and multi-file tapes might be the source of trouble. There are
ways to handle a few Cyber Record Manager formats, but some of them might
be quite difficult to decode properly after the transfer is done.
The recode program is usable only for a small subset of NOS text
formats, and surely not with binary textual formats, like UPDATE
or MODIFY sources, for example. recode is not especially
suited for reading 8/12 or 56/60 packing, yet this could easily arranged
if there was a demand for it. It does not have the ability to translate
Display Code directly, as the ASCII conversion implied by tape drivers
or FTP does the initial approximation. recode can decode 6/12
caret notation over Display Code already mapped to ASCII.
Please take a moment to fill out
this visitor survey You can help support this site by
visiting the advertisers that sponsor it! (only once each, though)
