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52 Year old data tape could contain Unix history
- gxd 1y agoThis is an incredible find. It would be amazingly cool if we could create an emulated environment for compiling and running Unix v4 from these sources.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 1y agoWild if we found out these early versions were rife with spyware and ads.
- tylerflick 1y agoOr even worse, what if they vibe coded it?
- 3eb7988a1663 1y agoThis will be the linchpin that proves SCO was right all along.
- ndiddy 1y agoSIMH emulates the PDP-11 (along with a ton of other early mini/microcomputers). It should be possible to run whatever's extracted from the tapes on SIMH. For example, the members of the TUHS mailing list were able to get an even earlier set of UNIX sources from 1972 running again, see here for more info: https://github.com/DoctorWkt/unix-jun72 https://github.com/DoctorWkt/unix-jun72
- larsbrinkhoff 1y agoThey were able to get an even earlier set of UNIX sources running on the SIMH PDP-7 emulator. SEVEN.
- bodyfour 1y agoIt's really easy to run for yourself: https://github.com/DoctorWkt/pdp7-unix/ https://github.com/DoctorWkt/pdp7-unix/ Don't expect it to do much, but it's fascinating if you're interested in OS history.
- anthk 1y agoYour parent commenter it's more than aware of Unix retroemulation and ITS...
- notorandit 1y agoFor doing what?
- Pet_Ant 1y agoFor the same reason one visits a museum. If that doesn't make sense to you, then doing this won't either.
- dare944 1y agoFor me, it's a chance to experience what it was like to use and develop software on these systems back in the day. For example, lately I've been writing some small apps and adding new kernel features to a variant of V6 Unix running on my PDP-11/05. It's humbling to see what it really took to be productive on these systems.
- anthk 1y agoSome people even did y2k patches to BSD 4.3. Also, tons of 'modern' software could run on it you can get GCC 2.95 and GCC 3.4. Lynx, for instance. Or gopher and IRC clients. And, maybe, with a bit of luck, Lua and JimTCL.
- iefbr14 1y agoFor nostalgia sake. It's from the computing period when there was a great influx of good idea's but still a huge shortage in memory and storage.
- amelius 1y ago> a huge shortage in memory and storage Maybe this explains why we have to call "creat" to "create" a file.
- SoftTalker 1y agoIdk about creat specifically but the utility names are all terse because you were interacting with the system on a 110-baud teletype.
- notorandit 1y agoI have mixed feelings. On one side I think we need to preserve this relic as we did with Homer's poetry. Because it just deserves. On another side I think we won't (and should not) try to preserve in an infinite present whatever has been written by humanity. For what purpose?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Forgeties79 1y agoYou never know what will be important to people in the future. I just listened to a great new episode (podcast) of The Truth (audio drama anthology series, they’re fantastic). It was called “The Joke.” Basically this archivist finds an old hard drive with a dumb pun joke - turns out she didn’t even understand it because jokes were no longer allowed in society. Kind of has an Equilibrium vibe but more bureaucratic and less “killing people for feeling.” Anyway the joke itself takes on great importance as a result. Bit of a dramatic comparison, but you see what I’m driving at.
- LorenDB 1y agoOld software like Unix tends to be some of the best-written software ever. Saving these systems gives us a valuable learning resource.
- znpy 1y agoI’ve learned this is not the case. Bryan Cantrill taught me in the talk about tail -f (and about how it was “treasuring up” data in buffers
- bcantrill 1y agoHa ha -- but maybe we can finally find the mysterious headwaters of ta?[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gp-RXCLO2M&t=3500s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gp-RXCLO2M&t=3500s
- 1970-01-01 1y agoNice find! That's around the same time the moon tapes went MIA. Look around a little more.
- drob518 1y agoThis is cool if it pans out, but I have three words for you: Al Capone’s vaults.
- jleyank 1y agoIt's quite sad that the computer field almost aggressively forgets or ignores its past. Find an early, say, crossbow and historians go nuts preserving and studying it. People recreate and surmise about Galileo's experiments to help others understand how he learned his physics, ... But the computer field just shrugs and keeps doing whatever they were doing. Given what the hackers of the 60's and 70's did on crap machines with no resources, you'd think people would want to review what they can teach modern developers.
- mmooss 1y agoIt's not just computers. The movie industry has been the same, and that is an artistic field - there's little obsolescence: Afiak there's no system to preserve films. Even essential films are lost; some burn up in fires; only some private groups have tried to save and restore the most important ones. For example, I read about one legendary American silent film thought lost forever and then was found somewhere in Spain, in a library IIRC (they had to translate the Spanish titles back to English). It happens in music and other fields. Perhaps the artists and businesses are focused on the present, not seeing their work as historic, and move on to the next thing. What happens to old projects you work on - do you preserve them carefully or are they just kind of left in whatever state they were at the end?
- jleyank 1y agoFWIW, I've got backups of stuff from the 80's and early 90's. Would have to be transliterated into new languages or versions of languages but the stuff's been copied from medium to medium so as to remain readable. But it's not my stuff that's important - would have been amazing seeing what the MIT hackers did (as they created hacking) or the Bell Lab people, etc. There's bazillion lines (and who knows how many star trek or 4x4x4 tictactoe games) in BASIC out there :-). Hell, perhaps it's good it's "forgotten" as it's what's powering the latest versions of Windows and other proprietary O/S.
- anthk 1y agoYou can emulate ITS for the PDP10 today under simh-classic which is 'culture' from the MIT frozen in time, from TECO Emacs to Dungeon/Zork and early networking. https://github.com/PDP-10/its https://github.com/PDP-10/its On Basic, there's the games example -Basic Computer Games- made into a repo at GitHub, and some people are recreating those in modern languages as it's a trivial task (I'm doing ports myself to JimTCL). https://github.com/GReaperEx/bcg https://github.com/GReaperEx/bcg You can actually use any language, even sh, but for these cases JimTCL it's ridiculously easy to use.
- Tor3 1y agoI have a 9-track CCT tape reader/writer which I've used for tapes going back to 1982 or so. I'm kind of surprised that a 1973 tape is 9-track and not 7-track, but then again I'm not certain when the change to 9-track happened. In any case, after cleaning the tape heads with a now illegal fluid all the reading issues I had at first disappeared, and I managed to retrieve the content of every tape I tried, from various minicomputers (some of them DEC).
- davidwritesbugs 1y ago"illegal fluid" what would that be? And why illegal? And do you submit the recovered data anywhere, for data archaeological purposes? Seems an important thing.
- HotGarbage 1y agoAmyl nitrate aka poppers
- Andrex 1y agoTechnically not illegal from my understanding.
- dtgriscom 1y agoperhaps benzine, or some other serious solvent that is now known to be hazardous?
- CamperBob2 1y agoCCl4 probably. Carcinogenic, at least for regular occupational exposure.
- SoftTalker 1y agoAnd formerly available at any pharmacy. When I cleaned out my parents house I found a bottle of it in the laundry room. I guess my mom used to use it on stains.
- deadbabe 1y agowill the code be published to github for all to read
- mrandish 1y agoAt least until SCO files a DMCA takedown. /s
- laxd 1y agoThe OG thread: https://discuss.systems/@ricci/115504720054699983 https://discuss.systems/@ricci/115504720054699983
- lproven 1y agoWhich I link to in the article, as well as later comments from that thread, and the TUHS discussion thereof.
- Animats 1y agoI still have my undergrad compiler project on UNIVAC UNISERVO II steel tape. 8 track (6 data bits, one parity, one clock). Either 50 or 200 BPI. Return to zero recording. I doubt there's a drive anywhere that could read it. But it's probably intact.
- dtgriscom 1y agoIt will continue to be intact until you try to read it; then, who knows?
- kragen 1y agoI imagine that the same procedure Kossow is using for the V4 tape would work, although you might need a few passes to get the tracks aligned properly with the heads. Once you have the analog waveforms digitized, decoding the data is just a matter of fiddling around in Jupyter for a while. RZ should be especially easy.
- codeulike 1y agoContents of tape: To Do: - make it easier to quit Emacs - change the temporary directory names we've been using - bin sounds like its for unwanted files, dev sounds like its for development, etc needs a better name. Its silly
- piekvorst 1y agoI like the ambiguity of bin and dev. Unix is full of such puns: cat, man, more/less, etc. Etc is strange, yeah.
- rmunn 1y agoI've personally seen someone ask a question, "My cat keeps jumping on my keyboard. Is there anything I can do to make sure she doesn't accidentally type a valid Unix command while I'm AFK?" And the answer was, "When you leave the keyboard, type "cat" and press Enter. That will put Unix in cat mode, where it will be protected from cats typing random characters." :-) (That's not verbatim, it's from vague memory of something I saw a couple years ago).
- anthk 1y agoSimh will run it for sure (get simh-classic, forget the propietary v4 ones).
- jmpman 1y agoThe IBM Tucson tape lab was able to recover the data from the space shuttle challenger’s tapes. I expect they could recover 52 year old tapes too.
- lproven 1y agoOh hey -- that's my article. Thank you, Ricardo!