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Newly discovered Unix V4 tape
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Diomidis Spinellis ☛ blog dds: 2025-12-23 — An initial analysis of the discovered Unix V4 tape
The Fourth Research Edition Unix came out of the famous AT&T Bell Laboratories in November 1973. A significant development it introduced was the rewriting of large parts of the system’s kernel in a high-level language (early C) rather than PDP-11 assembly language. The tape contains a complete system dump, including both source code and the compiled binaries and kernel. For inclusion in the Unix history repository, I removed the binaries, to match what is normally put under source code version control.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ 52 years later, only known copy of Unix v4 recovered from randomly found tape, now up and running on a system — first OS version with kernel and core utilities written in C
The only known complete copy of Unix v4 has been recovered from a tape found at the University of Utah.