Finding and reading in real decks to complete system load files

SYSTEM LOAD DECK AND CART RECREATION

I ran a reload of the phases I had in a card tray that came with my 1130 system, which are the DMS R2 V12 reload that runs against a full V11 system to create a V12 disk. These phases, real card decks from my system, were reloaded atop the virtual disk cartridge that comes with the IBM 1130 simulator.

Brian Knittel had painstakingly recreated the virtual decks by assembling the decks from a source tape and listings, but this test would let me know if there were any discrepancies on disk from my phases. I did a reload of my decks and then a sector by sector compare with DCIP. I found that one of my decks, phase08, was not a complete set of cards. It was missing some cards and therefore was shorter in my deck than in a real system. That threw off the rest of the system.

I retrieved the phase 08 deck and reread it, ensuring I had a complete deck, then redid the reload of my phases. I will iteratively do this until I ensure the correctness of both my real deck files and the simulator virtual cartridge  Deck 08 was repaired but the work continues.

In a related project, I began reading in my DMS R2 V11 card files, where I should find all the phases that were not included in the V12 reload decks. There are 31 phases that were not changed in V12, thus not included in the reload. I obtained them all and completed a full set of load decks.These also contain the header card text I was looking to capture for my utility program, thus allowing me to produce accurate header cards.

Now I have several 'editions' of disk cartridges I can cross check to validate everything. I have the virtual cartridge from the 1130 simulator, the recreated phases I produce from a live disk cartridge with my utility programs turned into a virtual cartridge, and the real decks from my 1130 system turned into a virtual cartridge. To the extent that everything compares exactly, I can be confident we all have a true and faithful version of DMS2 V12 everywhere.

I grabbed the DUP portion of the R2 V11 deck in my trays and found that it had all the phases, so that it appears to be a complete initial load version, including RPG, FORTRAN, COBOL and the rest of the system.. All phases that aren't updated in V12 will come from here.

Turns out I have access to all the official header cards and all the official object decks. My utility program wasn't actually needed, although it will be a good cross check against any real cartridges I have and against the virtual cartridges from the IBM1130.org site. The process of building and testing the utility reminded me (or taught me) a lot about the 1130 software stack.