Unix V4 tape found at The University of Utah

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This toot on the Fediverse describes a fun and historically significant discovery: a magnetic tape containing what may be an installation image of Unix V4 has been found at the University of Utah. The label on the tape says “UNIX Original from Bell Labs V4 (See Manual for format)”.

This is particularly exciting because there is no known complete V4 image, although some artifacts (including the complete manual sources) are known to exist. V4 was the first version of Unix with a C kernel (for which partial sources are known).

This tape has reportedly been connected with the Computer History Museum and will hopefully yield fruit.

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I hope the tape will be read. In my experience, CHM isn’t great about processing tapes, listings, etc and making those available to the public.

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There’s good news from bitsavers.org:

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A few details and links in Liam Proven’s piece in The Register

The staff member who found it is planning to drive it to the CHM, rather than ship it.

via HN discussion which has more links. (Including a related link to this forum: B -- A Simple Interpreter Compiler )

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