The first OpenVMS implementation of MRD supported the TF and TA family DLT media-changers. It used Mass Storage Control Protocol Display commands to indicate what cartridge should be moved. The MSCP uses cartridge address names instead of numbers as SCSI does. When SCSI support was added to the MRD, the convention of using strings for the address was kept and thus it has been since. In the common interface example programs, the character strings for the addresses are taken directly from the command line arguments and no special formatting is necessary. But, in practice, a program will probably keep SCSI addresses in numeric form and will have to convert those to strings. In the MRU command line interface and graphic user interface we use sprintf(3) for this: int element_number ; char element[MRD_NAME_SIZE+1] ; element_number = 5 ; sprintf(element, "%d", element_number) ;