Almost two months ago, a tape containing UNIX v4 was found. It was sent off to the Computer History Museum where bitsavers.org would handle the further handling of the tape, and this process has now completed. You can download the contents of the tape from Archive.org – which is sadly down at the moment – while squoze.net has a readme with instructions on how to actually run the copy of UNIX v4 recovered from the tape.
This is just amazing!
This is one of the best news in a while.
It is not that people will dig up a PDP and run this, but
1 – We will emulate it (if this the recovered UNIX 4 code is open sources)
2 – More importantly, it will help discover heritage of codes
We can have a very good “history” with the right tools for any piece of code in modern BSD (and maybe Darwin, too). Point to “grep.c” in FreeBSD and we can trace lineage all the way back (if someone takes this project on)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zh-9rBYmGow