Cassette tape commands The 1616 cassette storage system is a classic example of late twentieth century technological development. As you can see from the copious attention given it (both pages), we figure most users aren’t exactly heavily into cassettes, even at 3000 baud. However, if you haven’t got disk drives, you can still make a very fair go at working with the Applix 1616, using either cassettes, or another computer over the serial ports, for permanent storage. Set up a large ram disk, and remember when the power goes off, so does the disk. Just don’t switch off the power very often. Incidently, you can use the syscall mechanism to do raw cassette reads and writes for test purposes.
Here goes: Saving files on tape TSAVE pathname1 [pathname2] [pathname3] .... This command saves the named disk files on tape. Before entering this command first rewind the tape, put the player into record mode and allow the tape to move forwards until the leader is no longer over the tape head. Use the command to toggle the cassette relay during this operation. Type in this command when all is ready; the 1616/OS cassette drivers will turn the motor on and off as required. Alt T The cassette stop/start relay must be connected for cassette I/O to work success- fully. Archiving files on tape TARCHIVE pathname1 [pathname2] [pathname3] ....
1616/OS keeps track of those files which have been altered since they were loaded from or saved to cassette. These files appear with an in the left column of theirdirectorylisting(see theDIRcommand). Thepurposebehindthisistoremind you which RAM disk files have been altered and should be backed up on cassette before you turn off your 1616. The tape archive command saves on tape (as in TSAVE) only those files that a) Appear on the command line as ‘pathname1’ or ‘pathname2’, etc. and b) Require backing up. Suppose for example that you are working on some assembly language programs and at the end of the session you wish to save all the files that you have newly created onto tape.
A typical sequence of commands would be: DELETE *.bak ;Remove editor backup files TARCHIVE * ;Save all new files This will automatically save new files, skipping ones that have not altered, such as the executable binary file which contains the assembler, SSASM. 1616/OS Commands User Tutorial Manual Page 75