Post #2806797

A fascinating story about recovering and documenting the contents of a recently found magnetic tape dated June 1974 containing UNIX V4. The Computer History Museum’s Shustek Research Archive team carefully pulled the bits from the tape by reading its analog wave form and then using software to decode it into a digital form. This is a more reliable technique than using an old and reconditioned version of an original model tape drive that wrote it. The tape contains ‘"a tar file of the filesystem," and instructions on dumping an RK05 disk image from tape to disk (and what to do next).’ An RK05 is a hard disk drive manufactured by DEC in the early 1970s and was widely used with PDP-11 minicomputers with a capacity of about 2.5 MB (yes, megabytes). "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." https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/12/21/020235/bell-labs-unix-tape-from-1974-successfully-dumped-to-a-tarball https://archive.org/details/utah_unix_v4_raw