52 Year old data tape could contain Unix history
theregister.com198 points by rbanffy 2 days ago
198 points by rbanffy 2 days ago
Contents of tape:
To Do:
- make it easier to quit Emacs
- change the temporary directory names we've been using - bin sounds like its for unwanted files, dev sounds like its for development, etc needs a better name. Its silly
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 quite sad that the computer field almost aggressively forgets or ignores its past. Find an early, say, crossbow and historians go nuts preserving and studying it. People recreate and surmise about Galileo's experiments to help others understand how he learned his physics, ...
But the computer field just shrugs and keeps doing whatever they were doing. Given what the hackers of the 60's and 70's did on crap machines with no resources, you'd think people would want to review what they can teach modern developers.
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?
I listened to an interview with the woman who was at the time I believe overseeing the efforts of the Audio Engineering Society to address the problem of the countless recordings made on proprietary digital audio tape machines like the Sony PCM-3348. The total number of those machines that were ever built was small since so few studios could afford them, but they were major studios and thus the masters of many of the most culturally significant albums are on tapes in that format.
She mentioned that even if you could find one of the machines that was working, keeping it running required routine maintenance and that they were down to essentially one guy who was nearing the age of retirement who had the skill and parts to keep one running. So they were in a race against time to figure out which masters to convert.
The problem gets even more thorny for sessions that were recorded using software like ProTools, which has been around in some form or another for almost 40 years, has gone through countless revisions of project file formats, and has a complicated relationship with specialty audio hardware and software plugins.
It seems like there's a general awareness of the problem now and good studios are taking some measures to archive sessions in ways that allow them to be imported in the future, but in the meantime there are two decade's worth of recordings at risk, even if their media hasn't been lost or corrupted. I guess if nothing else its a cool opportunity for people who like to hack on systems of this type though.
All of the recording I did for my friends back in college is stuck in Nuendo/Cubase projects with a bunch of long-obsolete plugins used for mixing and mastering. Going forward I'm going to print every individual track to PCM so that I have a "digital tape" of the entire session to avoid this problem.
FWIW, I've got backups of stuff from the 80's and early 90's. Would have to be transliterated into new languages or versions of languages but the stuff's been copied from medium to medium so as to remain readable. But it's not my stuff that's important - would have been amazing seeing what the MIT hackers did (as they created hacking) or the Bell Lab people, etc. There's bazillion lines (and who knows how many star trek or 4x4x4 tictactoe games) in BASIC out there :-).
Hell, perhaps it's good it's "forgotten" as it's what's powering the latest versions of Windows and other proprietary O/S.
You can emulate ITS for the PDP10 today under simh-classic which is 'culture' from the MIT frozen in time, from TECO Emacs to Dungeon/Zork and early networking.
On Basic, there's the games example -Basic Computer Games- made into a repo at GitHub, and some people are recreating those in modern languages as it's a trivial task (I'm doing ports myself to JimTCL).
https://github.com/GReaperEx/bcg
You can actually use any language, even sh, but for these cases JimTCL it's ridiculously easy to use.
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.
Kind of -- but bear in mind that the software this article is about (I wrote the article, BTW) is older than the first microcomputer. (I'm using the MITS Altair as my example here.)
Retrocomputing is huge, but it rarely goes much older than CP/M.
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.
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.
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.
I disagree. People spend a tremendous amount of effort archiving computing history.
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.
/usr/share/games/fortunes and /usr/games have tons of history on any BSD.
There's TUHS, too.
On AI and such... errors accumulate over time, exponentially. Beware.
I have a 9-track CCT tape reader/writer which I've used for tapes going back to 1982 or so. I'm kind of surprised that a 1973 tape is 9-track and not 7-track, but then again I'm not certain when the change to 9-track happened. In any case, after cleaning the tape heads with a now illegal fluid all the reading issues I had at first disappeared, and I managed to retrieve the content of every tape I tried, from various minicomputers (some of them DEC).
>then again I'm not certain when the change to 9-track happened
1964, with the IBM 360's 8-bit bytes.
So, the 1973 one is likely really 9-track then, possibly 800 bpi. Should be fine reading that one on my drive, if the tape isn't in physically bad shape. Not that I expect them to ship it to me!
"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.
That was a bit tongue-in-cheek.. and a more accurate word would be "banned", not "illegal". It's just something HP used to sell, not dangerous as such, but it's a CFC-based tape head cleaner. Very efficient, and leaves nothing behind. But they stopped selling that particular variant after the Montreal protocol was in place, but I kept a bottle around.
CCl4 probably. Carcinogenic, at least for regular occupational exposure.
And formerly available at any pharmacy. When I cleaned out my parents house I found a bottle of it in the laundry room. I guess my mom used to use it on stains.
perhaps benzine, or some other serious solvent that is now known to be hazardous?
This is an incredible find. It would be amazingly cool if we could create an emulated environment for compiling and running Unix v4 from these sources.
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
They were able to get an even earlier set of UNIX sources running on the SIMH PDP-7 emulator. SEVEN.
It's really easy to run for yourself: https://github.com/DoctorWkt/pdp7-unix/
Don't expect it to do much, but it's fascinating if you're interested in OS history.
Wild if we found out these early versions were rife with spyware and ads.
For doing what?
For the same reason one visits a museum. If that doesn't make sense to you, then doing this won't either.
Unfortunately, I am working for an aerospace manufacturer that runs VAX VMS on emulators (which are quite expensive). We also run an even older operating system, OS2200.
The original VMS system manager who moved from 7000 series hardware to emulation was somewhat inquisitive, and we did install VMS 7 on simh. He retired and passed away some years ago, and none of his replacements have wanted to touch simh. I find that apathy appalling.
Given who wrote it, simh seems as close to an official VAX emulator as you are going to get.
The Charon/Stromasys sales staff described it as a toy.
In 1990's, maybe. Today simh-classic it's serious stuff up to the point a fork was made because some nut tried to tamper 1:1 disk/tape images with custom headers.
If you cannot learn from history, you'll have no future too, man.
That's why so many of these new age development tools, libraries and abstractions are such incredibly janky pieces of bloat that literally require what a few decades ago was supercomputers.
All downhill from here.
For nostalgia sake. It's from the computing period when there was a great influx of good idea's but still a huge shortage in memory and storage.
> a huge shortage in memory and storage
Maybe this explains why we have to call "creat" to "create" a file.
Idk about creat specifically but the utility names are all terse because you were interacting with the system on a 110-baud teletype.
For me, it's a chance to experience what it was like to use and develop software on these systems back in the day. For example, lately I've been writing some small apps and adding new kernel features to a variant of V6 Unix running on my PDP-11/05. It's humbling to see what it really took to be productive on these systems.
Some people even did y2k patches to BSD 4.3. Also, tons of 'modern' software could run on it you can get GCC 2.95 and GCC 3.4. Lynx, for instance. Or gopher and IRC clients. And, maybe, with a bit of luck, Lua and JimTCL.
The OG thread: https://discuss.systems/@ricci/115504720054699983
Which I link to in the article, as well as later comments from that thread, and the TUHS discussion thereof.
I still have my undergrad compiler project on UNIVAC UNISERVO II steel tape. 8 track (6 data bits, one parity, one clock). Either 50 or 200 BPI. Return to zero recording. I doubt there's a drive anywhere that could read it. But it's probably intact.
It will continue to be intact until you try to read it; then, who knows?
Nice find! That's around the same time the moon tapes went MIA. Look around a little more.
Simh will run it for sure (get simh-classic, forget the propietary v4 ones).
The IBM Tucson tape lab was able to recover the data from the space shuttle challenger’s tapes. I expect they could recover 52 year old tapes too.
Oh hey -- that's my article. Thank you, Ricardo!
will the code be published to github for all to read
This is cool if it pans out, but I have three words for you: Al Capone’s vaults.
I have mixed feelings.
On one side I think we need to preserve this relic as we did with Homer's poetry. Because it just deserves.
On another side I think we won't (and should not) try to preserve in an infinite present whatever has been written by humanity. For what purpose?
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.
I’ve learned this is not the case. Bryan Cantrill taught me in the talk about tail -f (and about how it was “treasuring up” data in buffers
What value do you see in Homer's poetry? How does that relate to these tapes?
Also, what risk is there to preserving?
Call it a piece of art. For me it is. And I won't discuss art here, because this is difficult. :-)
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.