That is a big deal; I don't remember anything that old being available on tuhs.org.
Unix v4 Tape Found
51–60 of 104 posts
Re: Unix v4 Tape Found
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no Preferences button. If there is, they've either hidden it well, or it's not visible without a login. There should simply be a button -- a conspicuous one -- that toggles the color scheme. It's trivial to add such a button. It doesn't need to be tied to a user ID; it doesn't even need to set a cookie. The fact that no such button exists is a choice someone made, a poor choice that disregards decades of huma…
Preferences shows up in the sidebar (that has the login and signup buttons) if you have an account. Otherwise it's up to the instance admin to choose the default.
And the admin should probably use the automatic setting. There is a feature request for a user preference when not logged in.[1]
Re: Unix v4 Tape Found
#53Finally we can see the naughty stuff they recorded!
Re: Unix v4 Tape Found
#54Other posts on this subject, none with discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45846438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45844876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45842643
I've added https://oldbytes.space/@bitsavers/115505135441862982 and https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/07/unix_fourth_edition_t... to the toptext as well. Thanks!
Also this post from Rob Pike with interesting thread of a bit more information about tape recovery https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2025-November/032758.htm...
Re: Unix v4 Tape Found
#55Will not be much different to the existing v5 source code, we can assume. https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V5/usr/source/...
Re: Unix v4 Tape Found
#56OT - 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 ?
Well, I won't debate whether "cool" is the right word. But ideologically I think federation is better than centralization when it can be made to work in practical terms, and Mastodon works.
Re: Unix v4 Tape Found
#57> 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*.
You might be able to use that old floppy drive. But you won't be able to use that old Pentium machine the drive is in. Because you will need several hundred gigabytes of RAM and a very fast IO bus. The gold standard today for archiving magnetic media is to make a flux image. The media is treated as if it were an analog recording and sampled at such a high rate that the smallest details are captured. Interpretation is…
It’s so obvious in retrospect but I never considered they would do this! Thanks for sharing.
Re: Unix v4 Tape Found
#58> 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*.
You might be able to use that old floppy drive. But you won't be able to use that old Pentium machine the drive is in. Because you will need several hundred gigabytes of RAM and a very fast IO bus. The gold standard today for archiving magnetic media is to make a flux image. The media is treated as if it were an analog recording and sampled at such a high rate that the smallest details are captured. Interpretation is…
'that were properly made' is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I've got a bunch of Sega Saturn and AKAI/Zero-G sample cds that are basically unreadable already due to disc rot. There was a lot of cheaply made optical media floating around in the late '90s.
Re: Unix v4 Tape Found
#59Someone in the Mastodon thread mentioned the Andrew Tannenbaum "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
So I wondered about a modern day equivalent, looked up 1tb micro-sd cards (sold locally for Nintendo Switch) and calculated that there'd be roughly space for 400 exabytes of data in a shipping container filled to the brim with SD-cards.
(SDcard being 1tb for 1.092 x 1,499 x 0,102 CM's and a shipping container being 1203 x 235 x 239 CM's inside so holding 400 million SD cards)
Re: Unix v4 Tape Found
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might be able to use that old floppy drive. But you won't be able to use that old Pentium machine the drive is in. Because you will need several hundred gigabytes of RAM and a very fast IO bus. The gold standard today for archiving magnetic media is to make a flux image. The media is treated as if it were an analog recording and sampled at such a high rate that the smallest details are captured. Interpretation is…
'that were properly made' is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I've got a bunch of Sega Saturn and AKAI/Zero-G sample cds that are basically unreadable already due to disc rot. There was a lot of cheaply made optical media floating around in the late '90s.
and anything you "burnt" yourself has an even shorter life.
In many ways our storage media has become more ephemeral as capacities have increased - except LTO at least which seems to keep up with storage demands/price and durability, LTO is eternal (or long enough to be able to move it from LTO-(N-4) to LTO-N at least).