Professor Robert Ritchie of the University of Utah's Callert School of Computing has managed to recover the tape drive data of the 1970s edition of UNIX V4, the first ever version of the UNIX operating system, whose kernel was written in the then-new C programming language.
As The Register reports, it can be downloaded from The Internet Archive and run in SimH.
To recover the data, Ritchie used the readtape program, developed by Len Shustek of the Computer History Museum. Like the better-known Greaseweazle tool for backing up old floppy disks, instead of trying to copy bytes or sectors from the media (in other words, the processed digital data), it works directly with the magnetic layer of the drive, which makes it possible to correct some errors. In this case, only two blocks were read incorrectly, but the data collected was enough to recover their contents.
The Internet Archive stores a raw image of 1.6GB, although the tape itself has a capacity of 40MB. Angelo Papenhoff offered a smaller version, accompanied by a README file explaining how to run it. The recovered data contains only about 55,000 lines of Unix version 4 code, of which about 25,000 lines are written in C, and less than 1,000 lines of comments. Unix really began to spread with its seventh release, Unix V7. It spread like a virus and its successors, forks and rewritten versions were widely adopted in industry and academia.
Comment on the article in our Forums. To be the first to know the most important things, like our page on Facebook, and follow us on Google News, TikTok, Telegram and Viber or download the Kaldata.com app for Android, iOS and Huawei!
Source: kaldata.com