52 Year old data tape could contain Unix history

I like the ambiguity of bin and dev. Unix is full of such puns: cat, man, more/less, etc.

Etc is strange, yeah.

It's not just computers. The movie industry has been the same, and that is an artistic field - there's little obsolescence: Afiak there's no system to preserve films.

Even essential films are lost; some burn up in fires; only some private groups have tried to save and restore the most important ones. For example, I read about one legendary American silent film thought lost forever and then was found somewhere in Spain, in a library IIRC (they had to translate the Spanish titles back to English).

It happens in music and other fields. Perhaps the artists and businesses are focused on the present, not seeing their work as historic, and move on to the next thing. What happens to old projects you work on - do you preserve them carefully or are they just kind of left in whatever state they were at the end?

Simh (now simh-classic) exists since the 90's. And every teen in the early 00's emulated 'expensive' systems from its era such as the PSX, the N64, SNES, NES (not everyone bought the Chinese clone), the Game Boy, MAME... and tons of them due to the love of retroemulation, either became a reverse engineer, programmer or at least got some sysadmin career because setting up some emulated systems requiered heavy knowledge, at least up to the levels of a vocational degree. If you understood tun/tap, networking under simh and you were able to set up NetBSD under it, you would earn a trade degree with ease.

I disagree.

There is a massive interest in older computing, both from a programming and from an art perspective. The demo scene thrives on it.

I have seen many times (and recently) a lot of interest here on HN about ancient 90s arcade machines with "unbeatable" encryption, etc.

There is a massive interest in doing reverse engineering old games to a bit-perfect level.

I think it is the same for any domain. Only a tiny amount of things from the past are preserved. The egyptian or mesoamerican pyramids would have probably been all demolished if it wasn't a costly task and/or space would have been a limited. We only conserved a small fraction of arts from previous centuries, most of the tools/weapons/machinery that remains from past centuries was mostly kept out of sheer luck because some people are hoarders and their descendency were lazy and recycling wasn't a thing, etc.

I disagree. People spend a tremendous amount of effort archiving computing history.

Find a crossbow from the 70's and i promise few will care. Historians rarely get excited about anything "lost" within living memory. Many a historian has spent a summer digging through an ancient roman trash pile. But you wont see any digging up landfills from the 80s.

I think the field is still too young. Archeologists are looking at things hundreds or thousands of years old. Galileo died in the late 1600s. I think in a couple hundred years people will give Unix (and other inventions of the time) the attention and respect it deserves.

That's certainly one opinion, and is even right, to some degree. But there's also movies like the Imitation Game about Alan Turing, which is a movie, and not a documentary, but there are also countless documentaries about him. There's no shortage of hagiographies about Steven Jobs, in both book and film and tv miniseries format, along with Pirates of Silicon Valley which includes Microsoft's part. There's a movie about Aaron Swartz (The Internet’s Own Boy). The movie Antitrust(2001) is fictional, but in the same area.

Hackers (1995) is fictional but a cult classic. Freedom Downtime (2001) is about Mitnick and hacking culture. There's smaller documentaries too. There's that one about Wikileaks, that one about Cambridge Analytica. There's books like The Dream Machine (Mitchell), Unix: A History and a Memoir (Brian W. Kernighan), The UNIX‑HATERS Handbook (Simson Garfinkel et al.). There's http://folklore.org about the early days at Apple. Asiometry has https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ffh3DRFzRL0, a 20 minute bit about the Unix wars.

The source code to the original Microsoft DOS is at https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS. The Anarchist Cookbook is on Kindle, https://www.2600.com/Magazine/digital-back-issues goes back to 2010.

DefCON got too big for the Riv and the Sahara, and is now at the LVCC. Yeah it's not the same. It's never going to be the same, but some still gather for their yearly mecca and watch Hackers and get drunk in hotel suites paid for by corporate sponsors. Others stay home for various reasons.

Do we still keep what we're doing? I mean, I don't program in Z80 ASM assembly anymore. There are still classes in my code by the focus on OOP isn't what it once was. I'm not sure if I want to call it progress, but I don't program Win32 applications anymore. I can spin up a web app with an LLM in an afternoon, and have it web-scale to the whole world in less time than it used to take to get a computer racked in a colo.

It's not 1979, the cable I use to go from USB-C to HDMI is more powerful than the computer that took us to space. By like, a million times.

Look, I'm not saying we shouldn't respect our elders. By this point, though my beard's not yet grey, relatively speaking I am an elder. I learned to program from paper books. Before ChatGPT, before Stack Overflow, before Google. There are some here that predate me by decades. If you're competing with a $10 million Oracle db system, and going from 6 ASM instructions to 5 in the inner loop will eke out that extra percent of performance, and win you the contract, by all means, sit down, roll up your sleeves, and hand optimize assembly in order to figure out how to get rid of that one instruction.

The joke is oft made, that other fields stand on the shoulder of giants, while in computer science, we stand on their toes. And it's not wrong. I can't wait to for the next new language to pop up and reimplement a DAG solver for their package management woes, and to invent a better sandbox for running untrusted code. That's still an unsolved problem. If this stuff interests you, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California is worth the visit. The only problem is that at the end of the tour is computers I grew up with, which has a certain way of making a fella feel old.

The travesty that is happening right now, is in the wake of Paul Allen's death, is the debache with his surviving sister and the Seattle Living Computer Museum.

>then again I'm not certain when the change to 9-track happened

1964, with the IBM 360's 8-bit bytes.

"illegal fluid" what would that be? And why illegal? And do you submit the recovered data anywhere, for data archaeological purposes? Seems an important thing.

SIMH emulates the PDP-11 (along with a ton of other early mini/microcomputers). It should be possible to run whatever's extracted from the tapes on SIMH. For example, the members of the TUHS mailing list were able to get an even earlier set of UNIX sources from 1972 running again, see here for more info: https://github.com/DoctorWkt/unix-jun72

Wild if we found out these early versions were rife with spyware and ads.

For doing what?

Which I link to in the article, as well as later comments from that thread, and the TUHS discussion thereof.

I imagine that the same procedure Kossow is using for the V4 tape would work, although you might need a few passes to get the tracks aligned properly with the heads. Once you have the analog waveforms digitized, decoding the data is just a matter of fiddling around in Jupyter for a while. RZ should be especially easy.

It will continue to be intact until you try to read it; then, who knows?

At least until SCO files a DMCA takedown. /s

It was not sad for me to have lookup the name Geraldo Rivera.

What about them?

Understanding, and inspiration. They had to create under serious constraints in compute, memory, and storage, and understanding how and why they did can lead to ideas about how to optimize software on modern machines.

It's also critical for understanding how and why the engineering choices were made when documenting the evolution of processing. Instruction sets, processor design, programming languages, computer culture, corporate trends, all of those things have roots in design decisions, and the software preserved on tapes like this are a sort of DNA.

The effort needed to incorporate the information is dropping, with AI you can run analysis and grab important principles and so on, and whatever principles govern optimization and performance under constraints will be useful on a permanent basis.

You never know what will be important to people in the future.

I just listened to a great new episode (podcast) of The Truth (audio drama anthology series, they’re fantastic). It was called “The Joke.” Basically this archivist finds an old hard drive with a dumb pun joke - turns out she didn’t even understand it because jokes were no longer allowed in society. Kind of has an Equilibrium vibe but more bureaucratic and less “killing people for feeling.” Anyway the joke itself takes on great importance as a result. Bit of a dramatic comparison, but you see what I’m driving at.

Old software like Unix tends to be some of the best-written software ever. Saving these systems gives us a valuable learning resource.

What value do you see in Homer's poetry? How does that relate to these tapes?

Also, what risk is there to preserving?

There's so little cost to store the contents of a single 9 track tape that there doesn't need to be any reason at all to do it.

Call it a piece of art. For me it is. And I won't discuss art here, because this is difficult. :-)