In the interest of the historical pats of this hobby,? having such a device available to use in Hercules might not be a bad idea, (...or maybe it is as I am speculating).? 

I think its an interesting idea but ...

It’s not an autotape library, but it's an auto dasd library of 3330's in appearance to MVS, the support for the device is apparently in the OS already, so it’s a single address and provides a selection of 3330 volumes.? - Admittedly small in size by today's standards, but the allocation in the underlying Linux disk system is not overly large, the mechanical aspects would not exist as it's all software as a Hercules device. 

Not everyone is a linux user!

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So the issues relating to this at the time being cumbersome and prone to breakage were all in the mechanical aspect, and it would no doubt be faster in operation.

You might need to slow it down. We already have issues with emulated tape because rewind and unload is instant.

???

Now I have no idea the effort required to create such a device, and assume one would need to have allocated the entire disk space at the time of creation of this MSS device when adding it to a config file.?? But it might be interesting to have. The whole allocation is not that excessively large given our host system disk space available. I mean seriously, a Tb is trivial anymore.

It depends how you implement it. You could just use one "huge" file and have some king of mapping logic, or one file for each cartridge and actually copy them to tracks on an emulated 3330.
If you have one file for each cartridge you don't need to create them all at boot up.? You can just have a cartridge number in the name and create as needed...
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What are the thoughts of others???? I would not be capable at the moment of creating this addition to Hercules itself to allow it to be allocated, and that may be a huge task for all I know it is.?? This is a question to the developers of Hercules and they no doubt have many competing priorities, this would be low priority.

I think the Hercules work isn't terrible, but like you I can't do it. There are other things I think that are more interesting....
... real TCPIP for example...

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But it might be nice to have it none the less, as a historical artifact, still useful, ecpically since the mechanical issues would not exist.? For those using MVS 3.8.??? It truly was a good idea at the time, and of course disk sizes and technology has passed it by, but so has technology passed by a lot of this and we still play with it.

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What's anyone think?

I think that what was interesting about this was the mechanical aspects. Remove those and things get a little boring. Does any one run tape sorts...

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Dave,

N8ZFM, Louisville, KY

dave@...?? dave40272@...

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Dave
G4UGM