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
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Noel Kelly
in reply to Rob Ricci • • •Noel Kelly
in reply to Noel Kelly • • •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.)Steven Sandoval
in reply to Rob Ricci • • •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.comJohnMashey
in reply to Rob Ricci • • •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: