Thalia ArchibaldRE: https://oldbytes.space/@thevowel/116253257354562286
I'll be giving a talk at VCF PNW!
"UNIX V4: History and Recovery"
DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)@thalia
Cool, great topic.
I didn't lay hands on UNIX until v6.
@dougmerritt Well thanks to many people’s restoration work, we can now use PDP-7 UNIX (complete), UNIX V1 (kernel), V2 (commands, kernel binaries), V3 (cc), nsys (kernel), V4 to V10 (complete), and many BSD versions. I’m happy to have been a part of this one.
I'm involved in efforts to recover Xenix, HPBSD, HP-UX, and mt Xinu. It seems likely we can recover sources for these and the licensing situation for Xenix is promising.
@thalia
Thanks for your work on that! These things are a very important part of history.
Warren Toomey credited me for being part of the v1 restoration:
> Independently and concurrently, Doug Merritt also worked on identifying the source fragments from the `s1' tape, and we used each other's work to cross-compare and validate the results.
> In the end, the `s1' tape contained source code for the assembler as, the Basic interpreter bas, the debugger db, the form letter generator form, the linker ld, and system utilities such as ar, cat, chmod, chown, cmp, cp, date, df, getty, glob, goto, if, init, login and ls. [1]
It was a happy coincidence that I was working on this at the same time as Warren's team, and we were able to pool our efforts.
> Finally, we are all indebted to Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, the researchers at Bell Labs and the cast of thousands who made UNIX into such a powerful, sophisticated and pleasant system to use.
Indeed. :)
[1] "The Restoration of Early UNIX Artifacts"; Warren Toomey
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix09/tech/full_papers/toomey/toomey.pdf
Also reference [11] there:
TOOMEY, W. Saving UNIX from /dev/null. In Proceedings of
the AUUG Open Source Conference (1999).