HEDRICK@RUTGERS.ARPA (03/11/84)
From: Charles Hedrick <HEDRICK@RUTGERS.ARPA> Don't knock IBM systems in areas for which they are intended. They may not have EMACS, but IBM has put in more thought and had more experience with data processing than the Unix world. I don't know the context of this comment, but if somebody is proposing a command to request the operator to mount a tape, the parameters mentioned are good ones: - vol_ser: Now and then people do make mistakes. One of the major motivations for implementing labelled tape processing on Tops-20 was so the system could automatically verify that the right tape had been mounted. It is easy enough to mount the right tape on the wrong drive, or to get a couple of characters reversed and mount the wrong tape. This can result in overwriting critical data. Some of this is silly on a 4-user system that sits in the same room as the user terminals. But on larger Unix timesharing systems, there are the same operational requirements as for as IBM mainframe or a DEC-20. My all means, tell the system what tape you want mounted, so it can check. - file name: this seems a bit vol_ser, file mode density -------