[HN Gopher] 52 Year old data tape could contain Unix history
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52 Year old data tape could contain Unix history
Author : rbanffy
Score : 131 points
Date : 2025-11-08 16:12 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| gxd wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| Wild if we found out these early versions were rife with
| spyware and ads.
| tylerflick wrote:
| Or even worse, what if they vibe coded it?
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| This will be the linchpin that proves SCO was right all
| along.
| ndiddy wrote:
| SIMH 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
| larsbrinkhoff wrote:
| They were able to get an even earlier set of UNIX sources
| running on the SIMH PDP-7 emulator. SEVEN.
| bodyfour wrote:
| It's really easy to run for yourself:
| https://github.com/DoctorWkt/pdp7-unix/
|
| Don't expect it to do much, but it's fascinating if you're
| interested in OS history.
| notorandit wrote:
| For doing what?
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| For the same reason one visits a museum. If that doesn't make
| sense to you, then doing this won't either.
| dare944 wrote:
| For 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.
| iefbr14 wrote:
| For 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 wrote:
| > a huge shortage in memory and storage
|
| Maybe this explains why we have to call "creat" to "create"
| a file.
| Aldipower wrote:
| If you cannot learn from history, you'll have no future too,
| man.
| justmarc wrote:
| That's why so many of these new age development tools,
| libraries and abstractions are such incredibly janky pieces
| of bloat that literally require what a few decades ago was
| supercomputers.
|
| All downhill from here.
| chasil wrote:
| Unfortunately, I am working for an aerospace manufacturer
| that runs VAX VMS on emulators (which are quite expensive).
| We also run an even older operating system, OS2200.
|
| The original VMS system manager who moved from 7000 series
| hardware to emulation was somewhat inquisitive, and we did
| install VMS 7 on simh. He retired and passed away some years
| ago, and none of his replacements have wanted to touch simh.
| I find that apathy appalling.
| rjsw wrote:
| Given who wrote it, simh seems as close to an _official_
| VAX emulator as you are going to get.
| notorandit wrote:
| I 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?
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| You 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 wrote:
| Old software like Unix tends to be some of the best-written
| software ever. Saving these systems gives us a valuable
| learning resource.
| znpy wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| Ha ha -- but maybe we can finally find the mysterious
| headwaters of ta?[0]
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gp-RXCLO2M&t=3500s
| observationist wrote:
| Understanding, and inspiration. They had to create under
| serious constraints in compute, memory, and storage, and
| understanding how and why they did can lead to ideas about how
| to optimize software on modern machines.
|
| It's also critical for understanding how and why the
| engineering choices were made when documenting the evolution of
| processing. Instruction sets, processor design, programming
| languages, computer culture, corporate trends, all of those
| things have roots in design decisions, and the software
| preserved on tapes like this are a sort of DNA.
|
| The effort needed to incorporate the information is dropping,
| with AI you can run analysis and grab important principles and
| so on, and whatever principles govern optimization and
| performance under constraints will be useful on a permanent
| basis.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| There's so little cost to store the contents of a single 9
| track tape that there doesn't need to be any reason at all to
| do it.
| Aldipower wrote:
| Call it a piece of art. For me it is. And I won't discuss art
| here, because this is difficult. :-)
| mmooss wrote:
| What value do you see in Homer's poetry? How does that relate
| to these tapes?
|
| Also, what risk is there to preserving?
| drob518 wrote:
| This is cool if it pans out, but I have three words for you: Al
| Capone's vaults.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| What about them?
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Nice find! That's around the same time the moon tapes went MIA.
| Look around a little more.
| jleyank wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| FWIW, 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.
| gooseyard wrote:
| I listened to an interview with the woman who was at the time
| I believe overseeing the efforts of the Audio Engineering
| Society to address the problem of the countless recordings
| made on proprietary digital audio tape machines like the Sony
| PCM-3348. The total number of those machines that were ever
| built was small since so few studios could afford them, but
| they were major studios and thus the masters of many of the
| most culturally significant albums are on tapes in that
| format.
|
| She mentioned that even if you could find one of the machines
| that was working, keeping it running required routine
| maintenance and that they were down to essentially one guy
| who was nearing the age of retirement who had the skill and
| parts to keep one running. So they were in a race against
| time to figure out which masters to convert.
|
| The problem gets even more thorny for sessions that were
| recorded using software like ProTools, which has been around
| in some form or another for almost 40 years, has gone through
| countless revisions of project file formats, and has a
| complicated relationship with specialty audio hardware and
| software plugins.
|
| It seems like there's a general awareness of the problem now
| and good studios are taking some measures to archive sessions
| in ways that allow them to be imported in the future, but in
| the meantime there are two decade's worth of recordings at
| risk, even if their media hasn't been lost or corrupted. I
| guess if nothing else its a cool opportunity for people who
| like to hack on systems of this type though.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| I disagree.
|
| There is a massive interest in older computing, both from a
| programming and from an art perspective. The demo scene thrives
| on it.
|
| I have seen many times (and recently) a lot of interest here on
| HN about ancient 90s arcade machines with "unbeatable"
| encryption, etc.
|
| There is a massive interest in doing reverse engineering old
| games to a bit-perfect level.
| Tor3 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| Amyl nitrate aka poppers
| dtgriscom wrote:
| [delayed]
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| CCl4 probably. Carcinogenic, at least for regular
| occupational exposure.
| deadbabe wrote:
| will the code be published to github for all to read
| laxd wrote:
| The OG thread: https://discuss.systems/@ricci/115504720054699983
| Animats wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| It will continue to be intact until you try to read it; then,
| who knows?
| Animats wrote:
| There's no oxide coating. It's a ribbon of steel on a steel
| reel.
| codeulike wrote:
| Contents 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_
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