AptiviUNIX Fourth Edition tape has been recovered!
For half a century, the UNIX v4 tape was not found, until this year. Everything changed when staff members at the University of Utah have found the UNIX v4 tape while cleaning out storage rooms. That was a very strong sign that the computer history was preserved and archived by those who make archives of old operating systems and other computer-related things.
UNIX v4 was officially released for the DEC PDP-11/45 computers on November 1973, when those computers were the only computers eligible for this version of UNIX. Since then, it was thought to be lost until November 7th when the tape has been rediscovered. Apparently, this tape was sitting somewhere in one of the storage rooms in the University of Utah.
The Computer History Museum has further handled this by letting bitsavers.org conduct the recovery process, where the tape has been successfully recovered to a raw tape, which has then been uploaded publicly to the Internet Archive for publication.
For those who are eager to run UNIX v4 using the simulation program, simh, on your host PC, you can follow the instructions on this page.
The Internet Archive entry has very interesting pieces of history of this tape that said:
- UNIX V4 tape from the University of Utah, received by Martin Newell in June 1974 around when he modeled the Utah Teapot.
- This is the raw analog waveform and the reconstructed digital tape image (analog.tap), read at the Computer History Museum’s Shustek Research Archives on 19 December 2025 by Al Kossow using a modified tape reader and analyzed with Len Shustek’s readtape tool.
- The tape was found in July 2025 by Aleks Maricq in the storage closet of the Flux Research Group in the Merrill Engineering Building, among the documents of Jay Lepreau.
- It was brought to the Computer History Museum by Jon Duerig and Thalia Archibald.
This tape was preserved in the storage room for more than half a century before it’s found in July 2025, then discovered on November, before being uploaded to the Internet Archive on December 22nd.
#news #simh #Tech #Technology #Unix #UNIXFourthEdition #UNIXV4 #update
