Michael DexterDid UNIX/Unix tapes have live file systems to dump in or tree of resources to pull from? Or something else!
Michael Galassiman 5 tar. Many more formats are documented in man 5 libarchive-formats. man 8 dump is also relevant.@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
@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?
Wintermute_BBS@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).