Lost Unix v4 Possibly Recovered on a Forgotten Bell Labs Tape From 1973 (theregister.com) 42
"A tape-based piece of unique Unix history may have been lying quietly in storage at the University of Utah for 50+ years," reports The Register. And the software librarian at Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum, Al Kossow of Bitsavers, believes the tape "has a pretty good chance of being recoverable."
Long-time Slashdot reader bobdevine says the tape will be analyzed at the Computer History Museum. More from The Register:
The news was posted to Mastodon by Professor Robert Ricci of the University of Utah's Kahlert School of Computing [along with a picture. "While cleaning a storage room, our staff found this tape containing #UNIX v4 from Bell Labs, circa 1973..." Ricci posted on Mastodon. "We have arranged to deliver it to the Computer History Museum."] The nine-track tape reel bears a handwritten label reading: UNIX Original From Bell Labs V4 (See Manual for format)...
If it's what it says on the label, this is a notable discovery because little of UNIX V4 remains. That's unfortunate as this specific version is especially interesting: it's the first version of UNIX in which the kernel and some of the core utilities were rewritten in the new C programming language. Until now, the only surviving parts known were the source code to a slightly older version of the kernel and a few man pages — plus the Programmer's Manual [PDF], from November 1973.
The Unix Heritage Society hosts those surviving parts — and apparently some other items of interest, according to a comment posted on Mastodon. "While going through the tapes from Dennis Ritchie earlier this year, I found some UNIX V4 distribution documents," posted Mastodon user "Broken Pipe," linking to tuhs.org/Archive/Applications/Dennis_Tapes/Gao_Analysis/v4_dist/.
There's a file called license ("The program and information transmitted herewith is and shall remain the property of Bell Lab%oratories...") and coldboot ("Mount good tape on drive 0..."), plus a six-page "Setup" document that ends with these words...
We expect to have a UNIX seminar early in 1974.
Good luck.
Ken Thompson
Dennis Ritchie
Bell Telephone Labs
Murray Hill, NJ 07974
If it's what it says on the label, this is a notable discovery because little of UNIX V4 remains. That's unfortunate as this specific version is especially interesting: it's the first version of UNIX in which the kernel and some of the core utilities were rewritten in the new C programming language. Until now, the only surviving parts known were the source code to a slightly older version of the kernel and a few man pages — plus the Programmer's Manual [PDF], from November 1973.
The Unix Heritage Society hosts those surviving parts — and apparently some other items of interest, according to a comment posted on Mastodon. "While going through the tapes from Dennis Ritchie earlier this year, I found some UNIX V4 distribution documents," posted Mastodon user "Broken Pipe," linking to tuhs.org/Archive/Applications/Dennis_Tapes/Gao_Analysis/v4_dist/.
There's a file called license ("The program and information transmitted herewith is and shall remain the property of Bell Lab%oratories...") and coldboot ("Mount good tape on drive 0..."), plus a six-page "Setup" document that ends with these words...
We expect to have a UNIX seminar early in 1974.
Good luck.
Ken Thompson
Dennis Ritchie
Bell Telephone Labs
Murray Hill, NJ 07974
A lucky find. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: A lucky find. (Score:4, Interesting)
Training AI right now to make fake versions of old UNIX.
Re:"will be analyzed at the Computer History Museu (Score:5, Informative)
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So what? Are you afraid someone is also going to resurrect Darl McBride or something?
So what was it written in before C? (Score:2)
Re:So what was it written in before C? (Score:5, Informative)
The kernel was written in PDP-11 assembler.
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*assembly
Geniza from between First and Second Temple? (Score:2)
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The odd thing is, I could have sworn that C was used for the original Unix, and was written for that purpose. Apparently not.
Guess I had a few of those facts mixed up in my head since Unix and C had so much mutual history together.
Take away my geek card (Score:4, Funny)
I used to get the two coupled like that until very recently. C didn't show up until around 1972. (UNIX was created in 1969). That factoid ended up being a minor plot point in a Chinese drama my wife is watching and I got it wrong, much to my embarrassment.
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Original Unix was written in B and assembly.
Remains to be seen... (Score:2)
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Re:Remains to be seen... (Score:5, Informative)
Or if it's even still readable. Intel when retrieving the 486 tape-in for the Edison project had to bake the tapes in an oven to remove moisture, and then had ONE CHANCE at imaging the tape as it crumbled to dust going through the reader.
Re:Remains to be seen... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Everybody knows you can archive things forever just by packing it up, encrypting it, and putting it in a "Britney Spears sex tape" torrent...
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I have a floppy controller on order that doesn't know how to read disks; it just passes through magnetic field data to software which is supposed to be able to reconstruct the disk image.
Hopefully these tapes will be OK to read as long as somebody can build a magnetic read head of the correct type.
Maybe with ML there will be a reasonable chance of reconstructing faded regions. Old audio tape is still mostly fine, so fingers crossed.
BTW, what a great job these folks have!
Re: Remains to be seen... (Score:2)
Generally its not too hard to hijack old hardware and add your own op-amps and whatever to the existing bias and drove circuits. Once you can get some signal in, even if you're just using your digital storage scope and some decently set up triggers you can crank though just about any old data set. Phase encoded, MFM, etc are all pretty easy to decode in software with a sufficiently fast microcontroller.
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I don't fear for civilisation in the slightest. Knowledge builds on knowledge to stay current. I don't need the original design documentation for the first ever wheel to know how how to make a modern one. We have lost countless things over the eons. We're not sure how the pyramids are built, we don't have design documents for the first aqueducts, we just know they existed but are unsure of how they figured out how to make them, we didn't know the Roman formulation for cement.
Yes civilization here has surpas
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Or if it's even still readable.
The Computer History Museum has had previous success reading such 9-track tapes (they have a dedicated lab for restoration and recovery).
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It's not so much the tape turning to dust but the glue holding the oxide layer on breaking down. Some brands hold up better than others over time and storage conditions are a huge factor. Sitting in a climate controlled university building for decades is probably the best case scenario.
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I've got tapes from the 80s I can still read - 9-track and QIC - so I doubt it's as bad as that.
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If they used a brand-new tape, it might be in very poor shape by now. If they put this on a re-used tape, or a new-old-stock tape left over from 1972 or 1971, it should be just fine. The reason?... 1972 was the year that whale oil was outlawed. All tape manufacturers (Ampex and 3M/Scotch in the USA) had to re-formulate to avoid whale oil, which had been the primary lubricant for recording tape since the 1940s.
The worst formulations were mostly Ampex 306, 406, 456... Scotch 206, 226, 808, 966, & 996,
Okay, but the big mystery NOW is... (Score:3)
Did they hold the 1974 seminar, or not???
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Indeed, and it was The Beginning:
The first meeting of Unix users took place in New York in 1974, attracting a few dozen people; this would later grow into the USENIX organization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix#1970s>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix#1970s [wikipedia.org]
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Indeed, and it was The Beginning:
The first meeting of Unix users took place in New York in 1974, attracting a few dozen people; this would later grow into the USENIX organization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix#1970s>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix#1970s [wikipedia.org]
I'd buy vintage merch from that if there was some, even a ratty t-shirt that smelled of stale sweat and Old Spice.
Meh? (Score:1)
The information ABOUT the version is much more valuable than the source code.
You don't put the source in a history book and that's the only place unix v4 is valuable.
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Speak for yourself. Some of us own hardware that can run this.
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Re:Meh? (Score:5, Insightful)
The information ABOUT the version is much more valuable than the source code.
The source code is the most important documentation about the source code.
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The information ABOUT the version is much more valuable than the source code.
The source code is the most important documentation about the source code.
Use the Source, Luke!
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Source code is the what/how, whereas documentation, manual pages and other records are the why/who/when/where.
Probably not relevant given the pedigree of who was working on the source, but with low quality source code or very “clever” source that is written in a “read-only” style, information from supporting documentation or design / implementation notes can be more useful.
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Source code is the what/how, whereas documentation, manual pages and other records are the why/who/when/where.
why/who/when/where is irrelevant without what/how, which tells us which one is more important.
We know a lot of the why/who/when/where, what was missing was the what/how. Now we have more what/how, so finding more of the other stuff is what's more important. But that's not because what/how isn't most important, it's because we have it now.
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The source code is the most important documentation about the source code.
The source code is written in assembly, it would be borderline useless without information and documentation to go with it. It's hard enough for people to read abstract languages without context. Just the source code itself for would require some serious weapons grade reverse engineering to make sense of it. You can work source code for a long time without ever understanding *WHY* something does what it does, which is far more important than how (provided by source code) or what (provided by testing source
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The source code is written in assembly
FTFS, "it's the first version of UNIX in which the kernel and some of the core utilities were rewritten in the new C programming language"
Put this source code in front of 99.9% of the people here on Slashdot and they'd be able to do nothing with it.
Yes, this place really has gone to shit.
Article is premature (Score:1)
As expected.
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