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 Museum for further handling, where bitsavers.org will conduct the recovery process.
I have the equipment. It is a 3M tape so it will probably be fine. It will be digitized on my analog recovery set up and I’ll use Len Shustek’s readtape program to recover the data. The only issue right now is my workflow isn’t a “while you wait” thing, so I need to pull all the pieces into one physical location and test everything before I tell Penny it’s OK to come out.
↫ bitsavers.org
It’s amazing how we still manage to find such treasures in nooks and crannies all over the world, and with everything looking good so far, it seems we’ll soon be able to fill in more of UNIX’ early history.
2050: A copy of the Windows 11 lock screen source code has been found! Now we can finally see how they loaded all the ads.
It would feel awesome hold something like this in one hands.
A piece of actual computer history, and a unique one to boot. The only known surviving copy of an great milestone in operating systems.
Hope they can properly recover the tape, though. It would be a very important achievement.
As the owner of a one-last-known-survivor computer, it’s quite an awesome. But the real satisfaction comes from getting it working. Ultimately, this is just a reel of old magnetic tape, and the value currently comes from what can potentially be read from it. If it turns out to have been wiped and rewritten, it will still be just a reel of old magnetic tape.
But, you can’t tell until you try to recover it. It might be a totally worthless lump of plastic, but it could well be a goldmine of computer history. It would definitely be interesting if the tape also contains source code, which it may do, given UNIX was often distributed by source at this time. Again, we will never know until recovery effort begin.
That is an awesome feeling.
Sometimes the kid in me comes out in these “geeking out” moments.
And congratulations on owning that piece of history.
“….and a unique one to boot.”
I see what you did there 🙂
when that opportunity presented itself…