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I recently got to talk to a big-ish name in the Boston music scene, who republished one of his band's original 1985 demos after cleaning the signal up with AI. He told me that he found that tape in a bedroom drawer.
Anyway, 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
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> As for CDs, I don't see the rush; the ones that were properly made will likely outlast human civilization. recordable CD-Rs or DVD-Rs do not last close to that long, and those are the ones that hold the only copies of certain bits (original versions of software, etc) that people are most interested in not losing. manufactured CDs and DVDs hold commericial music and films that are for the most part not rare at all.
Yes, good distinction. Recordable media will most likely contain data an individual intended to save. But because it's recordable, the dyes and structures on the disc aren't as stable. Long-lasting, good quality mastered optical media is probably mass produced and has many copies, including a distinct and potentially well-preserved source. It's probably fair to say that a lot of mixtapes (mix CDs?) from the early 200…
Not that it helps to recover older data, but things are better with Blu-ray today; at least if you buy decent quality discs. Advertised lifespans are multiple decades, up to 100 years, or even 500 years for "M" discs. And in the "M" disc case, it's achieved by using a non-organic dye, to avoid the degradation issues.
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It shoves dark mode down your throat whether you want it or not. What could be cooler than that?
There's an option
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There's an option
Really. Where? Unhelpful answers of the form "Just install extension X for browser Y and use it to run script Z" are all anyone has ever been able to suggest when I've asked this question elsewhere.
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Really. Where? Unhelpful answers of the form "Just install extension X for browser Y and use it to run script Z" are all anyone has ever been able to suggest when I've asked this question elsewhere.
If you click on Preferences, it's under Appearance which is the first section you see. You can change the site theme to a light option. At least on Mastodon.social.
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 human-machine interface research.
Failure to go full Karen about goofy things like this has made the Web a little worse for almost everyone in one way or another. So... there ya go.
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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.