"UNIX V4, the first ever version of the UNIX operating system in which the kernel was written in the then-new C programming language, has been successfully recovered from a 1970s nine-track tape drive. You can download it from the Internet Archive, and run it in SimH. On Mastodon, "Flexion" posted a screenshot of it running under SGI IRIX. Last month, we wrote about the remarkable discovery of a forgotten tape with a lost early version of Unix,"
"Since few of us in the microcomputer world deal with magtapes much, the Greaseweazle tool for archiving old floppy tapes might be a more familiar comparison: rather than trying to copy the bytes or sectors from media - in other words, the processed digital data - both readtape and Greaseweazle sample and record the raw magnetic flux variations. Those can then be used to reconstruct the digital data, making some error recovery possible."
A 1970s nine-track tape contained UNIX V4, the first UNIX kernel written in C. Computer History Museum curator Al Kossow recovered the tape image using low-level flux-sampling methods and the readtape tool. The kernel size was about 27 kB and only two tape blocks failed to read; those contents were reconstructed. The raw flux capture expanded into a 1.6 GB file even though the tape held roughly 40 MB of data. The recovered image is available on the Internet Archive and can be run in SimH, with screenshots and a short recovery video shared online.
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