Tools
Traditionally, VM Workshop has collected and published a "tools" collection -- a handy set of things attendees have developed to solve a problem or scratch an itch -- and have made available to the community at large.
Each year, the attendees of the VM Workshop bring with them tools and utilities that they have developed to make their jobs easier. In some cases, these include sophisticated packages to add function to common IBM products, such as REXX Sockets for TCP/IP. These contributions are put into a collection known fondly as the "VM Workshop Tools Tape".
These tools are made available to the VM Community in the hopes that they will help other VM programmers and spark new ideas for improving the VM environment. These tools are completely free, but also do not come with any guarantee as to their function. For more information or help with a tool, contact the original developer or maintainer of the tool.
While no longer on physical tape media, this page points to a collection of those "tapes" and descriptions of their content.
Most of the tools are provided in VMARC format, which is the original tape format. To retrieve the tool, click on the name. Your WWW client will prompt you to store it on your disk. Do this and then FTP the file to your VM system using BINARY mode. Once the file is on CMS, you must unblock it using the following CMS Pipeline:
PIPE < input_file |FBLOCK 80 00| > out_file F 80
Once a VMARC file has been unblocked, you must use the VMARC utility to decompress it into its original form. The VMARC utility is also available from this web page.
When retrieving a module that is not in VMARC format, you use the same procedure. To unblock it, however, use the following Pipeline:
PIPE < input_file|DEBLOCK CMS| > out_file