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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

#retrocomputing

UNIX Fourth Edition - Computer History Wiki

gunkies.org
#retrocomputing #unix
in reply to Rob Ricci

Noel Kelly
Noel Kelly
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Hope it's still readable.
in reply to Noel Kelly

Noel Kelly
Noel Kelly
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And that photo just reminded me of the lose of the Challenger. It was the first month at my first paid IT job (fresh faced grad). That particular week I was on the evening shift in the production computer centre. Lots of tape mounting and unmounting.

Forty years, the month after next.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster


in-flight breakup of the Challenger space shuttle in US

Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)
This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to Rob Ricci

Steven Sandoval
Steven Sandoval
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That tape would make for a nice MacGuffin in a story about a compiler parasite that infects all modern operating systems and which can only be detected and excised by a program compiled on a known clean compiler of sufficient complexity. https://research.swtch.com/nih

Ken Thompson. (1984). “Reflections on Trusting Trust”. Communications of the ACM, volume 27, issue 8. https://doi.org/10.1145/358198.358210 Accessed 2025-11-07.

research!rsc: Running the “Reflections on Trusting Trust” Compiler

research.swtch.com
in reply to Rob Ricci

JohnMashey
JohnMashey
• •
So cool, I hope it’s readable!
I arrived at Bell Labs Piscataway, into Rudd Canaday’s PWB/UNIX department October 1973, same week our PDP-11/45 got installed, 2nd one in BTL after ken+dmr’s. We ran UNIX V4 of course, first one whose kernel was in C.
We even got documentation besides man pages: the CACM article & ~20-page C reference, which i still have.
My car celebrates UNIX every day:
in reply to Rob Ricci

Rob Ricci
Rob Ricci
• •
The attempt to read the UNIX V4 tape is underway!
A laboratory environment with a tape driver and person leaning over other equipment
Thalia Archibald looking at the proceedings
Several men (sorry, I don't know names, will try to add later) in the lab
More lab equipment

reshared this

in reply to Rob Ricci

Rob Ricci
Rob Ricci
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There will be more video later (there's a TV news crew there) but here's a bit that Jon Duerig has sent from on-site
in reply to Rob Ricci

Rob Ricci
Rob Ricci
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I'm told "there is data" but I honestly don't know what that means yet
in reply to Rob Ricci

Rob Ricci
Rob Ricci
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Apparently the entire UNIX v4 tape was read successfully, what's going to need to happen next is to decode the signal from it, decipher the file formats, etc., I'll post updates as I get them
This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)

Cassandrich reshared this.

in reply to Rob Ricci

Rob Ricci
Rob Ricci
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We have the binary image of the tape, link going up soon
in reply to Rob Ricci

Rob Ricci
Rob Ricci
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Here's the document release you were waiting for today!

The UNIX V4 tape!

https://archive.org/details/utah_unix_v4_raw

Credits:

* Jay Lepreau for holding on to this tape
* Aleksander Maricq for finding it
* Jon Duerig for driving it to the Computer History Museum
* Thalia Archibald for doing a huge amount of research into the tape, its history, and file formats, and the upload
* Al Kossow for the tape-reading equipment and doing the actual read
* Len Shustek for the lab where the read was done and the software used to decode it

#retrocomputing


UNIX V4 tape from University of Utah (raw) : Computer History Museum : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

UNIX V4 tape from the University of Utah, received by Martin Newell circa June 1974 around when he modeled the Utah Teapot.This is the raw analog waveform and...
Internet Archive
#retrocomputing
This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)
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