Michael DexterFeb 20
Did UNIX/Unix tapes have live file systems to dump in or tree of resources to pull from? Or something else!
Show threadMichael Galassi
@dexter In the Unix world storage (tape/disk/whatever) is just a series of bytes, you can put anything you like there. The most common use of tapes (in the Unix world) is tar archives which are documented in man 5 tar. Many more formats are documented in man 5 libarchive-formats. man 8 dump is also relevant.
Feb 20 at 7:28pmWeb
Show threadMichael DexterFeb 20
@michaelgalassi Well yeah but what about the famous BSD distribution tapes or recently unearthed UNIX ones? When “distributing”, what form did that take in relationship to, if any, booting the target system?
Show threadWintermute_BBSFeb 20
@dexter @michaelgalassi they sent you a tape for your system (e.g. PDP-11) with instructions to issue at the hardware boot console + switches. then you booted from tape the way @erikarn described. then you went on to install (from tape to disk).
Show threadMichael GalassiFeb 20
@dexter Historically tape drives are character devices, not block devices. File systems require block devices. That's not to say that you could have a special boot loader which read in a tape and treated it like a disk but early Unix systems ran in 64k words of memory or less, not enough to run from a memory disk. I can however imagine an equivalent of dd from the tape drive to the disk device followed by a regular boot from the disk drive.