[TUHS] unix v4 tape found

[steve jenkin via TUHS]

Liam Proven has written a nice piece in ’The Register’, includes history, why finding this piece is important & more.

Links to videos and many CHM and other sources, including Oral Histories.

LP wonders “Is this a Christmas Miracle?”
It’s certainly the original CSRC spirit of “Cooperation and Collegiality” alive & well.

Link & extract at end.

> On 7 Nov 2025, at 09:44, Al Kossow via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
> On 11/6/25 2:41 PM, Rob Pike via TUHS wrote:
> 
>> We have arranged to deliver it to the Computer History Museum
> 
> another day, another project.

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Original message on-line
	<https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2025-November/032759.html>

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	UNIX V4 tape successfully recovered: First ever version of UNIX written in C is running again
		Crucial early evolutionary step found, imaged, and ... amazingly … works
		Liam Proven 
		Tue 23 Dec 2025
		<https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/23/unix_v4_tape_successfully_recovered/>

	Computer History Museum software curator Al Kossow has successfully retrieved 
	the contents of the over-half-a-century old tape found at the University of Utah last month.

	Last month, we wrote about the remarkable discovery of a forgotten tape with a lost early version of Unix, 
	found by Professor Robert Ricci at the Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah.

	At the time, we quoted the redoubtable Kossow, who also runs Bitsavers, 
		as saying that it "has a pretty good chance of being recoverable.” 

	The data was recovered using the readtape program by the Computer History Museum's Len Shustek.

	So, in the recovered files on the Internet Archive, 
	you can see there's a 1.6 gigabyte file created from a tape that only held 40 MB or so of data. 
	You probably don't want to download that.

	Fortunately, Angelo Papenhoff offers a processed version, complete with a README telling you how to run it. 

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