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mastodon - Link to source

While cleaning a storage room, our staff found this tape containing #UNIX v4 from Bell Labs, circa 1973

Apparently no other complete copies are known to exist: gunkies.org/wiki/UNIX_Fourth_Eโ€ฆ

We have arranged to deliver it to the Computer History Museum

#retrocomputing

An old reel to reel magnetic tape. It has a label, in Jay Lepreau's handwriting, proclaiming it to be "UNIX Original from Bell Labs v4 (see manual for fmt)"

UNIX Fourth Edition - Computer History Wiki

gunkies.org
in reply to Rob Ricci

mastodon - Link to source

Rob Ricci

We have some more information on this! One of @regehr's grad students

did some excellent sleuthing and figured out that this was received by Martin Newell : archive.org/details/unix_news_โ€ฆ

If that name sounds familiar to you, it's probably because his teapot is ubiquitous in computer graphics: graphics.cs.utah.edu/teapot/

cv.thalia.dev/

UNIX News July 30 1975 : USENIX Association : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

UNIX NewsVolume 1 Number 1, July 30, 1975
Internet Archive
This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Rob Ricci

mastodon - Link to source

Steven Sandoval

That tape would make for a nice MacGuffin in a story about a compiler parasite that infects all modern operating systems and which can only be detected and excised by a program compiled on a known clean compiler of sufficient complexity. research.swtch.com/nih

Ken Thompson. (1984). โ€œReflections on Trusting Trustโ€. Communications of the ACM, volume 27, issue 8. doi.org/10.1145/358198.358210 Accessed 2025-11-07.

research!rsc: Running the โ€œReflections on Trusting Trustโ€ Compiler

research.swtch.com
in reply to Rob Ricci

mastodon - Link to source

Rob Ricci

Here's the document release you were waiting for today!

The UNIX V4 tape!

archive.org/details/utah_unix_โ€ฆ

Credits:

* Jay Lepreau for holding on to this tape
* Aleksander Maricq for finding it
* Jon Duerig for driving it to the Computer History Museum
* Thalia Archibald for doing a huge amount of research into the tape, its history, and file formats, and the upload
* Al Kossow for the tape-reading equipment and doing the actual read
* Len Shustek for the lab where the read was done and the software used to decode it

#retrocomputing


UNIX V4 tape from University of Utah (raw) : Computer History Museum : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

UNIX V4 tape from the University of Utah, received by Martin Newell circa June 1974 around when he modeled the Utah Teapot.This is the raw analog waveform and...
Internet Archive
This entry was edited (4 days ago)

reshared this

in reply to Rob Ricci

mastodon - Link to source

Rob Ricci

Thread about the .tap format for those who want to dig in more:

github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacsโ€ฆ


Repair Gosling emacs.tap from Universitรคt Stuttgart by thaliaarchi ยท Pull Request #17 ยท larsbrinkhoff/emacs-history

Gosling Emacs file ftp.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pub/cm/dec/decus/emacs.tap is corrupt, as reported in #15. I repair two broken parts. Every 4096 bytes, the byte sequence "\0\x10\0\0\0\x10\0...
GitHub
in reply to Rob Ricci

mastodon - Link to source

SnoopJ

it's super cool to be able to watch the live output of the (presumably?) analog read signal and what seems like conversion to digital on the readout (hard to tell after Mastodon's compression, I assume the original file is higher-fidelity)

I got the impression that at ~00:48 in your video, the spooling passes the start-of-tape reflective marker (TIL) and the actual data segment begins, and Al was remarking on that looking like it would for reading any old tape.

in reply to Rob Ricci

mastodon - Link to source

Ethan Blanton

This is freaking awesome. I took the liberty of posting it here: retrocomputingforum.com/t/unixโ€ฆ

Unix V4 tape found at The University of Utah

This toot on the Fediverse describes a fun and historically significant discovery: a magnetic tape containing what may be an installation image of Unix V4 has been found at the University of Utah.
Retro Computing
in reply to Rob Ricci

mastodon - Link to source

Colin Gordon

you're famous! mstdn.social/@osnews/115505586โ€ฆ

OSNews

2025-11-07 00:29:40

mastodon - Link to source

Tape containing UNIX v4 found

A unique and very important find at the University of Utah: while cleaning out some storage rooms, the staff at the university discovered a tape containing a copy of UNIX v4 from Bell Labs. At this time, no complete copies are known to exist, and as such, this could be a crucial find for the archaeology of early UNIX. The tape in question will be sent to the Computer History Muse

osnews.com/story/143719/tape-cโ€ฆ

#Unix


Tape containing UNIX v4 found โ€“ OSnews

OSnews

in reply to Rob Ricci

mastodon - Link to source

kuulman

If someby's interested, Ncommander made super cool streams trying to compile Unix V6: youtu.be/BWrZIc1rG5s

STREAM: Attempting To Recompile A Lost Version of UNIX from 1978!

Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/ncommanderPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/ncommanderTwitter: https://twitter.com/FOSSfirefighterDiscord: https://discord.gg/V8esNah...
NCommander (YouTube)
in reply to Rob Ricci

mastodon - Link to source

JohnMashey

So cool, I hope itโ€™s readable!
I arrived at Bell Labs Piscataway, into Rudd Canadayโ€™s PWB/UNIX department October 1973, same week our PDP-11/45 got installed, 2nd one in BTL after ken+dmrโ€™s. We ran UNIX V4 of course, first one whose kernel was in C.
We even got documentation besides man pages: the CACM article & ~20-page C reference, which i still have.
My car celebrates UNIX every day:
Image of UNIX license (plate, not the university agreement that basically said as is, no support)
in reply to Rob Ricci

hometown - Link to source

Space Catitude ๐Ÿš€

This popped up on my YouTube home page today:

KSL News Utah reporting on this find:
youtube.com/watch?v=IR-f07LN0-โ€ฆ

#RetroComputing #Unix #BellLabs


University of Utah team discovers rare computer relic

A research team at the University of Utah uncovered a rare piece of computing history.Read: https://ksltv.com/?p=853296----Socials for KSL TV: https://twitte...
KSL News Utah (YouTube)
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