Bell Labs 'Unix' Tape from 1974 Successfully Dumped to a Tarball (discuss.systems) 19
Archive.org now has a page with "the raw analog waveform and the reconstructed digital tape image (analog.tap), read at the Computer History Museum's Shustek Research Archives on 19 December 2025 by Al Kossow using a modified tape reader and analyzed with Len Shustek's readtape tool." A Berlin-based retrocomputing enthusiast has created a page with the contents of the tape ready for bootstrapping, "including a tar file of the filesystem," and instructions on dumping an RK05 disk image from tape to disk (and what to do next).
Research professor Rob Ricci at the University of Utah's school of computing posted pictures and video of the tape-reading process, along with several updates. ("So far some of our folks think they have found Hunt The Wumpus and the C code for a Snobol interpreter.") University researcher Mike Hibler noted the code predates the famous comment "You are not expected to understand this" — and found part of the C compiler with a copyright of 1972.
The version of Unix recovered seems to have some (but not all) of the commands that later appeared in Unix v5, according to discussion on social media. "UNIX wasn't versioned as we know it today," explains University of Utah PhD student Thalia Archibald, who researched early Unix history (including the tape) and also worked on its upload. "In the early days, when you wanted to cut a tape, you'd ask Ken if it was a good day — whether the system was relatively bug-free — and copy off the research machine... I've been saying It's probably V5 minus a tiny bit, which turned out to be quite true."
Research professor Rob Ricci at the University of Utah's school of computing posted pictures and video of the tape-reading process, along with several updates. ("So far some of our folks think they have found Hunt The Wumpus and the C code for a Snobol interpreter.") University researcher Mike Hibler noted the code predates the famous comment "You are not expected to understand this" — and found part of the C compiler with a copyright of 1972.
The version of Unix recovered seems to have some (but not all) of the commands that later appeared in Unix v5, according to discussion on social media. "UNIX wasn't versioned as we know it today," explains University of Utah PhD student Thalia Archibald, who researched early Unix history (including the tape) and also worked on its upload. "In the early days, when you wanted to cut a tape, you'd ask Ken if it was a good day — whether the system was relatively bug-free — and copy off the research machine... I've been saying It's probably V5 minus a tiny bit, which turned out to be quite true."
Hell yeah (Score:3)
Fire up simh (or your real PDP-11) and step back in time.
Re:Hell yeah (Score:4, Informative)
Somebody notify Dave Plummer!
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Because with his collection of old hardware, I think he would enjoy getting it to run.
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Or even better, get Unix v0 and boot in on your old trusty PDP-7 (or again, use SIMH).
I worked with magnetic tape a bit in the late 80s (Score:2)
I'd be really, REALLY surprised if this image isn't chock full o' flipped bits and other random garbage.
Still - this is really cool though!
Re:I worked with magnetic tape a bit in the late 8 (Score:4, Interesting)
Some brands of tape fare better than others over the years. I've had 7 track tapes from the late 60s still be readable.
Re:I worked with magnetic tape a bit in the late 8 (Score:5, Informative)
There were two "bad blocks," and both have been recovered.
read once? (Score:2)
i am curious of the condition of the tape. was this a situation where we got one shot to read the tape? did it self-destruct as it ran past the read head?
Re:read once? (Score:4, Interesting)
there's a video in the summary, you could try to guess the condition from it: https://discuss.systems/@ricci... [discuss.systems]
Let's say I've seen worse.
Imagine (Score:2)
Since we're stepping back in time, I’m going there. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of tape readers! Ignoring if a cluster of tape readers even makes sense.
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Nope. they store that tape in a climate-controlled environment...
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Could this be the year of Unix on the desktop ?
Don't we already have that w/ macOS?
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Interesting (Score:5, Informative)
It's great that they managed to restore this. Aside from the purely historic interest, early Unix had some fascinating tools - translators for B and SNOBOL and other languages, a text to speech converter, the m6 macro processor, the tmg compiler generator, and the early versions of roff/nroff/troff are very interesting too.