[TUHS] Software Archaeology Challenge?

Henry Bent henry.r.bent at gmail.com
Tue Apr 7 08:48:47 AEST 2020


On Mon, 6 Apr 2020 at 18:12, Warren Toomey <wkt at tuhs.org> wrote:

> Anybody feel up for a bit of an archaeology challenge? Warner Losh is
> currently poking through a bunch of bits but not having much luck decoding
> them correctly. I've put a copy here:
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/Y5/Challenge/
>
> If you can help, I'd suggest report major findings here, and we can use
> the #TUHS channel in the ClassicCmp Discord server for chat.
>
> Here's what Warner has found out so far:
>
>    It's quite interesting, but in a
>    format I've so far not been able to decode more than with emacs.
>    However, there's all kinds of wonderful here. This looks like it was a
>    dump from a VMS (or maybe similar DEC OS) ANSI tape. There's 4 datasets
>    of 2.5MB each.  The first one appears to be a V5 tree of some sort (at
>    least it matches the V5 sources in places I can spot check in
>    Dennis_v5. The second block looks v6ish or maybe pwbish, but no kernel
>    sources. I don't think it's a continuation of the v5 stuff from the
>    first dataset. The third dataset is all binaries, as far as I can tell
>    so far, but things like mv and passwd. The 4th dataset appears to be
>    the dump of a VENIX-11 system, complete with source.
>
>    The 3rd dataset appears to be a Venix system. At least it has venix and
>    venix.old in what looks like the root directory. Still trying to sort
>    out extracting files from these datasets. v7fs hates them, but I'm
>    almost positive that's what they are.
>

Looking at the first file as well as the later 512 byte files, this appears
to have been made on an RT-11 system.  There are entries for HDR1ZEROED.ZZZ
which shows up in the RT-11 5.07 sources:
http://www.kpxx.ru/DEC/PDP-11/Software/OS/RT-11/05.07/05.07.abl/Unpacked/DUPZMC.MAC
.  Unfortunately I have absolutely no experience with magtapes under RT-11
so I'm not currently sure how to proceed.

-Henry
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