Table of Contents
CDC.IO Utility
Overview
One of the most challenging facets of working with PLATO in the NOS simulated environment is that we (as hobbyists) are confined to the Input/Output mechanisms defined “in the day”. Meshing the old technology with new technology is both a blessing and a curse. We get the benefit of modern technology speed, but the downside of transferring files between the esoteric formats of the past, and present-day filesystems is a non-trivial matter. Moreover, the ability to do proper configuration management of source files was (at best) cumbersome and by modern standards, inferior to anything we have today.
While NOS had a rudimentary system to apply updates and perform change management (MODIFY), there is no ability to do source management other than brute-force backup/restore. Making matters worse, the ability to do backup/restore and correction of files was very coarse. Entire PLATO files needed to be moved and making source-level changes was primitive. These are just a few examples of hurdles which needed to be overcome.
In the hobbyist world, we also have the added benefit of VASTLY greater: storage space, CPU speeds and I/O Bandwidth.
To help bridge the gaps between modern systems and the CDC environments, a utility, CDC.IO was created (and is actively being enhanced) which enables the hobbyist to work at a very fine-grained level with these old structures and is primarily tuned to the needs of the PLATO Hobbyist.
A Word of Warning
This tool has been extensively tested on all known configurations that are available today. Your configuration may have some quirks that may not be understood by this utility and that means (as always) there is RISK in not having proper backups.
You Have Been Warned
Windows Users
When redirecting I/O, Python uses a default encoding for Windows (cp1252 for US Windows), but will look to an environment variable if you want to override it:
C:\> set PYTHONIOENCODING=utf8 C:\> test.py > out.txt
Recently:
set PYTHONUTF8=1
will also make Python default to UTF-8 for files and I/O redirection.
We recommend that you make these changes permanent, in your USER or SYSTEM environment.
General Installation and Use
Installation for general use is packaged as a zip file. Instructions and tutorials on this site are updated
periodically but the instructions for use (which is also the output of cdc.io allhelp) are updated with each
significant release (changes in node 1 or 2 of the version identifier).
Installation
Download CDC.IO (Windows Only) Version 2.3.1 , check the signature:
SHA256-Checksum of cdc.io.2.3.1.windows.zip:
c357e55e17dc79a2a99ba29d1d217cbc3b858fb98f9c342fd8a85154f5cd8ae2
Unzip the contents to a folder (and add it to your path if needed).
Verify
At a shell/command window prompt, type cdc.io version.
The following should appear:
A separate (text file) version of the ALLHELP content may be downloaded separately
That's it!