OT - Mastodon is seriously cool. If you haven't yet bothered, I suggest to everyone that you spend a bit of time exploring.
Mastodon is just a part of the larger Fediverse.
Yeah I guess I still haven't wrapped my mind around that other part.
Unix v4 Tape Found
21–30 of 104 posts
Re: Unix v4 Tape Found
#22OT - Mastodon is seriously cool. If you haven't yet bothered, I suggest to everyone that you spend a bit of time exploring.
What makes it cool?
Re: Unix v4 Tape Found
#23> It is a '70s 1200ft 3M tape, likely 9 track, which has a pretty good chance of being recoverable. Not old enough to have this kind of knowledge or confidence. I wonder if instead one day I'll be helping some future generation read old floppies, CDs, and IDE/ATA disks *slaps top of AT tower*.
Just anecdata, but I had this concern when I worked in academia and we backed up all our data to writable DVDs. I was there 10 years after the start of the project and I periodically checked the old DVDs to make sure they weren't corrupted. After 10 years, which was longer than the assumed shelf life of writable/rewritable DVDs at the time, I never found a single corrupt file on the disks. They were stored in ideal c…
Thank your procurement agent and hvac guy.
My team used to maintain go-kits for continuity of operations for a government org. We ran into a few scenarios where the dye on optical media would just go, and another where replacement foam for the pelican cases off gassed and reacted with the media!
Re: Unix v4 Tape Found
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just anecdata, but I had this concern when I worked in academia and we backed up all our data to writable DVDs. I was there 10 years after the start of the project and I periodically checked the old DVDs to make sure they weren't corrupted. After 10 years, which was longer than the assumed shelf life of writable/rewritable DVDs at the time, I never found a single corrupt file on the disks. They were stored in ideal c…
Thank your procurement agent and hvac guy. My team used to maintain go-kits for continuity of operations for a government org. We ran into a few scenarios where the dye on optical media would just go, and another where replacement foam for the pelican cases off gassed and reacted with the media!
Wow! That's pretty interesting. I can imagine wanting to store optical media in Pelican cases or similar for shock protection, ability to padlock, etc. But yeah -- what's the interaction between whatever interior foam they chose and the CD-R media and dyes? Especially after 10+ years of continuous contact?
Optical media is probably best stored well-labeled and in metal or cardboard box on a shelf in a basement that few will rarely disturb.
Re: Unix v4 Tape Found
#25Please let there be an ultimate force in the universe that spared this tape from tape degradation and/or magnetization that it can be read and extracted into a raw dump fs that we can preserve for all time. (fingers crossed) Tapes from back then haven’t held up over the years. It all depends on the environment it was stored in.
I remember reading we're nearing a timeframe where VHS and cassette tapes made in the <=1980s will start degrading pretty seriously. So if you own lots of VHS or camcorder tapes you have a relatively short window to save old family videos... or just deal with fuzzy images and bad audio.
Re: Unix v4 Tape Found
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank your procurement agent and hvac guy. My team used to maintain go-kits for continuity of operations for a government org. We ran into a few scenarios where the dye on optical media would just go, and another where replacement foam for the pelican cases off gassed and reacted with the media!
Wow! That's pretty interesting. I can imagine wanting to store optical media in Pelican cases or similar for shock protection, ability to padlock, etc. But yeah -- what's the interaction between whatever interior foam they chose and the CD-R media and dyes? Especially after 10+ years of continuous contact? Optical media is probably best stored well-labeled and in metal or cardboard box on a shelf in a basement that f…
It was a really fun project. We basically made these disaster kits, with small MFPs, tools, laptops, cell radios and INMARSAT terminals hooked to Cisco switches (this was circa 2002-3) and a little server. We had a deal that let us stow them in unusual places like highway rest stops.
We’d deploy them to help respond to floods or other disasters.
One of the techs cooked up a great idea — use Knoppix or something like it to let us use random computers if needed. Bandwidth was tight, but enough for terminal emulators and things like registration software that ran off the little server. So that’s where we got into the CD/DVD game. We had way more media problems than we expected!
Re: Unix v4 Tape Found
#27Re: Unix v4 Tape Found
#28Anyway, since nobody much seems to realise this is quite a big deal, I will share the explainer I wrote yesterday: https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/07/unix_fourth_edition_t... Unix V4 is otherwise lost. It was the first version in C.
The bit in the article about the recovery procedure, which involves dumping info from the tape into '100-ish GB of RAM' and then using software to analyze it stuck out to me. This video on the linked github page for the analysis software[1] is interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YoolSAHR5w&t=4200s [1] https://github.com/LenShustek/readtape
Well, the tape may not survive its second pass across the read head, so it's good to capture the analog waveform in as much fidelity as possible.
Re: Unix v4 Tape Found
#29I really, really hope data can be recovered from this. I’ve read a bunch of the original sources, and such an ancient C would be especially interesting to study.
Very proud to have had this found at my University :-)