A tape-based piece of unique Unix history may have been lying quietly in storage at the University of Utah for 50+ years. The question is whether researchers will be able to take this piece of middle-aged media and rewind it back to the 1970s to get the data off.
The news was posted to Mastodon by Professor Robert Ricci of the University of Utah's Kahlert School of Computing.
While cleaning a storage room, our staff found this tape containing #UNIX v4 from Bell Labs, circa 1973 Apparently no other complete copies are known to exist: https://gunkies.org/wiki/UNIX_Fourth_Edition We have arranged to deliver it to the Computer History Museum
The nine-track tape reel bears a handwritten label reading:
UNIX Original From Bell Labs V4 (See Manual for format)
Ricci says that the handwriting on the label is that of his former advisor Jay Lepreau [PDF], who died of multiple myeloma in 2008.
If it's what it says on the label, this is a notable discovery because little of UNIX V4 remains. That's unfortunate as this specific version is especially interesting: it's the first version of UNIX in which the kernel and some of the core utilities were rewritten in the new C programming language. Until now, the only surviving parts known were the source code to a slightly older version of the kernel and a few man pages – plus the Programmer's Manual [PDF], from November 1973.
More was to follow – some hours later, he continued:
We have some more information on this! One of @regehr's grad students did some excellent sleuthing and figured out that this was received by Martin Newell: https://archive.org/details/unix_news_july-30-1975/page/n9/mode/2up If that name sounds familiar to you, it's probably because his teapot is ubiquitous in computer graphics: https://graphics.cs.utah.edu/teapot/
So, this is the original copy of UNIX Fourth Edition received from AT&T by the inventor of the Utah Teapot – as seen in the original Windows NT OpenGL screensaver.
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