[TUHS] Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?

[Kenneth Goodwin]

Regarding
It's still fun to think about. .

On the lighter side of life
Perspectives in eternity

The Ghost in the Machine

What happens to core images when they finally fade away? Do they go to some
binary form of heaven ? Do their bits roam free on some ethereal plane of
existence 🤔?

According to the laws of physics, nothing gets created or destroyed.  It
merely changes state.

Would a V6 image be reincarnated as itself or would it come back as a new
Linux variant?

What happens to the electrons and magnetic fields that composed its essence
when it was "alive" flowing through copper channels and silicon valleys?

Time to journey up the mountain and contemplate the existential nature of
silicon based "life forms"

(Geek humor for a Saturday morning 🌄)

On Fri, Jul 18, 2025, 6:42 PM ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:

> I was admiring this list of cool artifacts, thinking I had none, then
> remembered in the corner I have a 64K PDP11 core plane, which, when it
> failed, had a V6 kernel image in it.
>
> Now, that was 50 years ago, so magnetic donuts or no, that image is long
> gone, but it's still fun to think about.
>
> Also, I have a DECTape from the late Jim McKie, somewhere, but I forget
> what was on it.
>
> I still have my "documents for use with ..." book, and the BSTJ, but so do
> many of you ;-)
>
> Finally, somewhere, I also have a budget page from a document I found in a
> dumpster at Murray Hill. This would have been 2007, or so, when lots of
> people were leaving and lots of offices were being "dumpster lobotomized";
> I saw the doc in a dumpster and ripped out that page. It seemed of interest.
>
>
> On Fri, Jun 13, 2025 at 7:27 PM Daria Phoebe Brashear <shadow at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Jun 11, 2025 at 18:35 Greg A. Woods <woods at robohack.ca> wrote:
>>
>>> At Tue, 10 Jun 2025 12:10:28 +1000, Rob Pike <robpike at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Subject: [TUHS] Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?
>>> >
>>> > An original, hand-wire-wrapped Jerq board, later renamed Blit because
>>> of
>>> > marketing. Also the original mouse, made by Prof Nicoud's lab and
>>> signed by
>>> > him on the bottom.
>>>
>>> The mice that came with the DMD-5620s, the Dépraz Mouse, "Made in
>>> Switzerland" (one of mine says "Type D 85 / P") looks very similar.  I
>>> have one in an original AT&T package too.
>>>
>>
>> Ah yes. Mice. I still have two new-in-their-boxes DEC Hawley puck mice.
>> VSXXX-AA, with two rollers.
>>
>> They kept tracking reliably whereas the ball variant always got gunked up
>> and skipped, but our DEC mice tended to succumb to Nettrek disease, where
>> the left button would get clicked to death, and the replacements were
>> inevitably the ball version.
>>
>> I never managed to source a wheel version at the time to just carry with
>> me. Got two years later, planning to give one to a friend a few months
>> older than me for his collection. Cancer intervened and he is several years
>> gone now, alas.
>>
>
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