Summary
- Researchers at the University of Utah found a tape with Unix V4, the first version written in C, considered lost decades ago.
- The tape, labeled “UNIX Original From Bell Labs V4,” contains an original copy sent by AT&T to Martin Newell and will be forwarded to the Computer History Museum.
- Al Kossow of the Bitsavers project will attempt to recover data from the tape using high-speed converters and 100 GB of RAM, prioritizing recovery due to historical value.
A piece of computing history may have resurfaced in a warehouse at the University of Utah, in the United States. A magnetic tape containing Unix V4, released in 1973 by Bell Laboratories, was found by researchers while cleaning out a storage room.
The find is notable because this is the first version of Unix written in C, a language created shortly before by Dennis Ritchie, and of which there are practically no known complete copies left. According to professor Robert Ricci, from the Kahlert School of Computing, the tape had been archived for more than five decades and will now be sent to the Computer History Museum, in California.
What’s on the tape and why is it important?
The tape consists of a nine-track reel with the handwritten label “UNIX Original From Bell Labs V4 (See Manual for format)”. It has an even more curious historical connection: the text was written by Jay Lepreau, a former professor at the university who died in 2008. According to Ricci, the media contains an original copy of Unix sent by AT&T to Martin Newell, creator of the famous Utah Teapot, a 3D model widely used in computer graphics.
Unix V4 represented a turning point in the history of technology, marking the transition from assembly to C, which made the code more portable and influential in later operating systems such as Linux and macOS. Until then, only isolated parts of this edition were known, such as kernel fragments and technical manuals dated November 1973.
Is it possible to recover data from tape?
The tape will be taken by car to the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, where archivist Al Kossow, known for the Bitsavers project, will try to recover its contents. The process requires extreme care: he plans to digitize the analog signals directly from the tape, using high-speed converters and up to 100 GB of RAM to store the raw data, which will then be reconstructed with special software.
“The electrical tape is applied to the read amplifier of the read head, using a high-speed multichannel analog-to-digital converter that dumps the data into about 100 gigabytes of RAM, followed by an analysis program written by Len Shustek. This is a 1200-foot (approximately 365 meters) 3M tape from the 1970s, probably 9 channels, which has a good chance of being recovered,” he explained.
Kossow said that because it is a 1,200-foot, nine-track 3M tape, the chances of success are good – even though the material is more than half a century old. According to him, the recovery was prioritized in the museum’s list of projects, given the historical value of the discovery. “This is so rare that I am prioritizing recovery from this problem at the top of my project list,” he said.
Source: https://tecnoblog.net/noticias/fita-com-primeira-versao-do-unix-em-c-e-encontrada-apos-mais-de-50-anos/
