(Image credit: Getty Images)
There’s probably more than a handful of Unix lovers among the TH audience, and today’s tale is a Christmas gift that should warm many a cold sysadmin’s heart. The University of Utah’s School of Computing found and recovered a magnetic tape with the only known copy of Unix v4, the first version of the operating system with both its kernel and core utilities written in that shiny newfangled language known as C.
The recovery process was carefully executed, but the results were "easy" as these things go. The nine-track 3M tape is from 1973, making it over 50 years old, and had "a pretty good chance of being recoverable." That was a fair assessment by archivist Al Kossow of Bitsavers, who did the actua…
(Image credit: Getty Images)
There’s probably more than a handful of Unix lovers among the TH audience, and today’s tale is a Christmas gift that should warm many a cold sysadmin’s heart. The University of Utah’s School of Computing found and recovered a magnetic tape with the only known copy of Unix v4, the first version of the operating system with both its kernel and core utilities written in that shiny newfangled language known as C.
The recovery process was carefully executed, but the results were "easy" as these things go. The nine-track 3M tape is from 1973, making it over 50 years old, and had "a pretty good chance of being recoverable." That was a fair assessment by archivist Al Kossow of Bitsavers, who did the actual recovery by "taping off the head read amplifier, using a multi-channel high speed analog to digital converter which dumps into 100-ish gigabytes of RAM, then [the readtape] analysis program Len Shustek wrote."
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Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He’s obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he’s usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals.