A tape recording UNIX V4 created at Bell Labs 52 years ago, which was said to have no complete copy in existence, is found in a warehouse
A recording medium more than 50 years old containing UNIX V4, which was said to have no complete copy in existence, has been discovered.
Unix V4: Only known copy may lurk on recently unearthed tape • The Register
https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/07/unix_fourth_edition_tape_rediscovered/
Professor Robert Rich of the Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah reported that while cleaning out a warehouse, he discovered a tape containing a version of UNIX V4 from Bell Labs (circa 1973). The tape is marked 'UNIX Original from Bell Labs V4 (See manual for format).'
According to Professor Rich, the handwriting on the label belongs to Jay Lepro, who died of multiple myeloma in 2008. If the label contains UNIX V4 data, as it claims, it would be a remarkable discovery, technology media The Register points out.
UNIX V4 is known as the first UNIX version with a kernel and some commands written in C, but the complete version of V4 was said to no longer exist . All that remains are a few pages of kernel source code from a slightly older version of UNIX V4 and a manual published in November 1973 .
However, The Register also points out that 'the question is whether data can be extracted from this old media.'
Rich explains that he will deliver the tapes to the Computer History Museum , run by Al Kossou , the museum's software librarian, who also runs Bitsavers, a nonprofit archival project that preserves and makes available computer history materials.
Bitsavers said, 'The equipment is ready. (It was found) on 3M tape, so it's probably fine. I plan to digitize it with an analog recovery system and recover the data using Len Shustek 's readtape . The only problem now is that my workflow isn't 'while I wait,' so I need to physically gather all the parts in one place and test them all before telling Penny I can take it. The whole process is to test the condition with a tape tensioner. Baking takes a day, so I'd like to avoid that if possible. Then I'll digitize it and transfer the tens of GB of samples to another machine for decoding. I'd like to skip the transfer step and run the analyzer on the digitizer.' He commented, describing the steps to archive the data immediately.
