They may have found a tape with the only known copy of UNIX V4!

This is a remarkable historical find! (at least for computer people)

A storage room at the University of Utah was being cleaned out and they found a 9-track reel tape, labeled "UNIX Original From Bell Labs V4 (See Manual for format)". Univ V4 is a milestone version from 1973 in that it is the first version completely written in the C programming language, which became the standard for many years. Somehow the source code was lost, and this might be a recovery point!

The big question is: is the tape readable... And there's absolutely no way to know that until the tape is literally studied to see what shape it physically is in and then hopefully mounted on a tape drive and read.

A 9-track tape is the classic seen in old movies where you see people popping 14" tapes into drives that stand taller than a person, and the tape drops into a loop lower into the drive so there's slack, causing no direct tension on the tape itself as it spools back and forth. I spent some time in data centers in the '80s doing some apprenticeships and also working for a certain moving van rental company mounting them, which I actually found to be a lot of fun.

The problem is... FIVE DECADES? There's no information as to what sort of storage room the tape was found in. Was this a proper university library archive, with temperature and climate control? Was the tape stored flat, or upright? If it was stored flat on its back, then 50 years of gravity may have distorted an edge of the tape. Even upright, in less than an ideal environment, may have caused it to degrade and stick to itself.

There's absolutely no telling if the tape is readable. I don't remember if 9-track tapes stored much in the way of recovery data if part of it is unreadable, so if there's a bad patch, can information still be recovered? I have no idea. But there is hope: the tape is being sent to the Computer History Museum, where I believe they not only have a tape drive that can read it, they probably have old boffins who are familiar with the encoding format and have the expertise that might be able to recover more information from it if there is problems.

We shall see. Interesting times!

The information on it is purely of historical interest, there's no program code on it that will revolutionize current programming theory. At that time, Unix shipped as source code - the actual C programs - and you had to compile it on your specific computer to make it work. This made the operating system maintainable as you could fix any bugs that came up, then you could talk to the guys at AT&T and tell them what happened and they could theoretically incorporate a better fix in the master for the next release. But all subsequent generations of Unix built on V4 had better code implementations, so as I said, it's probably purely of historical interest. If it's recovered, people will have fun looking at the code, but they'd learn more of computer science studying current Linux source code.

Apparently they are going to drive the tape nearly 800 miles (about 12 hours) to the Computer History Museum rather than risking shipping it, I wish them safe travels! And the Museum already has plans on how to read the tape - though I hope they plan on doing a physical examination first, unless, of course, it was stored in ideal conditions the whole 50 years.

Yeah, I think I'd drive it, too, rather than ship it. And the way flying is screwed up right now with the government shutdown? Probably faster to drive.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/07/unix_fourth_edition_tape_rediscovered/

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/11/09/0528258/lost-unix-v4-possibly-recovered-on-a-forgotten-bell-labs-tape-from-1973

We saw an aircraft deploying anti-missile flares tonight!

Today Russet had an appointment in Las Cruces to get her eyes poked, and with the early sunset, plus dinner, plus not getting into the back of the office for almost two hours after her appointment time it was well after dark before we were driving across White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) going home.

So in Southern New Mexico on the west side of the basin is Las Cruces, then east of Cruces you have the Organ Mountains. On the east side of the mountains you have White Sands Missile Range, and an Army post of the same name. There's also a NASA engine test facility (I almost had a job there once) and who knows what else there. The space shuttle 747 transporter, complete with shuttle, once landed there when the weather was too bad for it to continue on to Florida from Edwards in California due to storms over the gulf states. Turns out it was a really bad mistake as the gypsum sand from White Sands really screwed over the plane (mainly the brakes, maybe some engine damage?) and they had to fly in a maintenance crew and work on that plane for the better part of a week before it could leave!

On the east side of the valley you have Alamogordo on the west base of the Sacramento Mountains. Just west of town there's Holloman Air Force Base, and just beyond that is the actual White Sands Desert, the largest gypsum desert in the world. Looks really cool on Google Earth. Pretty much the entire valley between those two mountain ranges is the White Sands Missile Range, with U.S. 70 running through it, about 60 miles or so. They close it occasionally when they test missiles.

WSMR is a HUGE test range that also includes the section where the Trinity Test took place! They offer tours there once or twice a year, I've been there two or three times.

So Russet's eyes are dilated and she can't see much, I'm driving east and suddenly I see four little red dots appear in a line! And they fade really fast. It sort of looked like the lights on a broadcast antenna, except they were at about an 80 degree angle, not a healthy angle for an antenna, and way too high for such a thing. Too close to be on top of the Sacramento Mountains and the antenna clusters that are on the mountains are much further south. I ask Russet, but she hadn't been looking, she'd probably had her eyes closed. If straight ahead was twelve o'clock as a compass point, this was probably at around 10 or 11 o'clock.

Just a couple of minutes later, on the right side of the car - call it about 1:30 as a point, four more! It was clearly anti-missile flares: a tight pattern, rapidly deployed, and quickly extinguishing. If they'd been illuminating flares, they'd have had a much longer duration. This time Russet saw them, and she was impressed!

That was pretty cool to see! But there's no way of knowing what type of aircraft was popping them. Odds are it was an F-16 Falcon (jet fighter/light tactical bomber) as that's the main aircraft based at Holloman, but it could have been a helicopter out of either WSMR or Holloman or some other plane visiting Holloman. Holloman used to base F-119s and F-22s, but those went away and we got a whole bunch of F-16s from Luke in Glendale, AZ. We also used to have a German Luftwaffe detachment that flew two different types of fighters that were very cool as they had great paint schemes! Sadly one of the jet types was retired and the other was moved to Goodyear, AZ to consolidate operations and the detachment left. They were really nice people, I liked working with them.

Holloman is famous for its rocket sled program which is still occasionally in use - at my wife's observatory they would slew the telescope around and watch this little bright light go ZIP! across the desert when a test happened, the base was also the home of Ham the Space Chimp, the first American monkey in space! Ham is actually an acronym for Holloman Airbase Medical, and Ham is buried in Alamogordo at the New Mexico Space Museum.

Still, those flares were something that I've never seen before at night.