52 years later, only known copy of Unix v4 recovered from randomly found tape, now up and running on a system — first OS version with kernel and core utilities written in C
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/unix-v4-recovered-from-randomly-found-tape-at-university-of-utah-only-known-copy-of-first-os-version-with-kernel-and-core-utilities-written-in-c
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That was some happy Christmas Day news!
how is the tape not decayed, wouldn’t a single bit scramble enough to make it unreadable?
And somehow it will be more stable than half the software released this year
The person whose life work it was to destroy these is in shambles.
Is this mainly a historic curiosity or are there nuggets you can glean to make the current system better?
This aligns well with [John Titor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor)’s plan to bring a 1975 UNIX system into the year 2036 to save the world. Perhaps 2025 is one of his stops. (If anyone else has been on the Internet long enough to remember this.)
I mean who cares
This is like the Mechanicus finding an STC printout.
“It’s a Unix system, I know this!”
Is this the one they used in Jurassic Park?
Did we make a proper backup this time?
What does this mean to everything on the tech side?