@dexter Finally, Mike's comments on filesystem image vs dump format
----
Incidentally, dumps are much more of a pain than file system images
to extract.
It's hard to describe.
No, it's not that. It's just that...(looking at v7restore source)
Ah, that's right. In order to extract a dump, you need to first
build an in-core picture of the hierarchy.
Because the dump is just done of inode numbers in order.
Then, once you know what name to associate with each inode, you
can extract things.
Traversing a file system image is much simpler--you just start
at the root directory inode, and do the moral equivalent of a recursive
walk on the file system, extracting the files as you visit them.
The problem is that dumps are in linear order, and don't contain
convenient seek addresses for traversing in logical order.

St. Olaf? Hah! I was assigned a student sysadmin job when I attended Carleton College!

Dave Diehl, told me I couldn't work the job I was assigned, because it was: "reserved for upperclassmen" and I was only a freshman. Perhaps the first time he was a thorn in my side, not the last. ;( He also seemed to think I was a "hacker" because I had listed a Commodore Amiga on my résumé, but he clearly didn't mean it in a complimentary fashion. ;(

Worse: I was told by the MathCS department: I couldn't use the SGIs, because I was also "not an upperclassmen" even though I had already been toiling on such systems (and nicer ones, some of them, down to their microcode) at nps.navy.mil (now nps.edu) before I was even at Carleton and had toured SGI's campus more than once. Indeed, seeing the SGIs in Carleton's newly renovated (this was circa 1994) MathCS department was one of the reasons I decided to attend. (A gorgeous red head I met during the prospective student week was another reason, but alas, she also wasn't interested in me beyond friendship.)

Instead? I ended up slogging away on their awful NeXT systems and horrid VMS running Vax and such. I think they later had one DEC Alpha that ran Tru64 that only professors used, I got to see one in person, but wasn't allowed "time" on it.

sigh I did eventually (winter of my first year) get a different student job after someone in my dorm was tipped off to me being a nerd, so I ended up working as a "Divisional Computing Consultant" for Humanities faculty and was granted all the elevated privileges I presumably would have received if I hadn't been thrown under a bus by Dave Diehl (whom I later learned: never even graduated, he just kind of kept hanging around the geek houses and became a fixture on campus).

So much grief, for such backwater systems, and minimum wage student job pay at that! IIRC, Carleton's uplink for the entire campus was a 56K leased line when I started there (my 14.4 modem presumably ate up about a quarter of the bandwidth before they upgraded). Oh yeah, and whether it was UPS or the mail room (I suspect the latter) my Amiga 2000 was smashed en route to college. I didn't end up getting a replacement (thanks to someone selling a used A1200 on comp.sys.amiga.marketplace for about what the UPS insurance payout was) until my second trimester. Which meant that my first trimester I was mostly sitting in front of their dumb terminals and those awful NeXT systems. Eventually the MathCS department upgraded to a 486dx2 66MHz NeXTStep lab and that super slow OS became barely usable. Omniweb, almost made the World Wide Web seem, bearable. I still think it's mostly awful. (Not that I was a proponent of gopher).

I know older UNIX sources exist (I helped restore some of them).

Do any of you know Bob Fabry? It was his birthday on the 12th, apparently he turned 86!

"In 1971, Berkeley Professor Bob Fabry buys a $99 copy of UNIX and provides it to a group of students, including Bill Joy, who modify the original code to include a number of new features." (via https://www.berkeley.edu/about/history-discoveries/ click on Contributions/Discoveries and then the 1977: "Berkeley UNIX and the birth of open-source software" as a citation for that quote)

I haven't crossed paths with him personally, despite doubtlessly knowing many in common (I work in Berkeley these days too); but I am guessing he has some memories in such realms?

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