Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

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

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 15:39:34 GMT

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

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Linus Torvalds and Dirk Hohndel speak at the Open Source Summit

Sun, 21 Apr 2024 07:33:06 GMT

At The Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit North America, Linus Torvalds and his good friend Dirk Hohndel, Verizon's Head of the Open Source Program Office, once more had a wide-ranging conversation about Linux development and related issues.

Sadly, it's a summary and commentary on their talk, not really a detailed copy of their talk. It's quite interesting, and not a long read. Their thoughts on AI are amusing: 'Spell check with steroids'.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-takes-on-evil-developers-hardware-errors-and-hilarious-ai-hype/

https://linux.slashdot.org/story/24/04/19/1944235/linus-torvalds-on-hilarious-ai-hype

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Windows gets Rust(y)!

Fri, 19 May 2023 04:23:10 GMT

This is excellent news. Most of Windows is written in C and C++. Those languages have memory problems. Let's use a simple example. There's a programming construct known as an array, it's sort of an indexed list. Let's say we have an array called MyList(10). It has ten elements to it, what's in them doesn't really matter. What happens when you try to reference element 11?

Usually in the C family of languages, you access the memory 'above' the tenth element and what is returned is undefined: we don't know what it will contain. Maybe it overlaps with the password cache, perhaps it has your banking account number in it.

Now, to be fair to C (personally I hate the C/C++ languages, but I firmly believe in 'to each their own'), later versions have better protection against accessing outside array boundaries and things like that which can cause information to leak.

A while back another programming language came to town, Rust. And it is designed, from the clear page, to have memory protection that will prevent access to element 11 and other buffer/memory issues. Which means that code, properly developed! (always a big problem), will theoretically be safer/more secure than C family languages.

Microsoft is now rewriting some subsystems in the Windows operating system into Rust!!!

This is excellent news. The ability to improve security is always a good thing, and this is the first step in doing it. You simply cannot rewrite the entirety of Windows in Rust in one swell foop, but you can rewrite portions of it - letting you see how it works - and progressively get the whole thing redone eventually!

This is now in an Insider edition of Windows 11, meaning it will eventually see the light of day to all users, and should be completely transparent.

In other Rust news, Linux has started rewriting SUDO into Rust. Sudo is a program that lets an account that does not have administrative permission run admin commands if they have the password for it. A fundamental rule of network security, and computer security in general, is to NEVER let your users run their local machines as administrator! Aside from the fact that it gives them far too much control to utterly screw their machine over - and I've seen it! - if your account with admin permissions gets taken over by malware, that's a leverage point to get into the entire network and subvert it!

Speaking as a system administrator, we see far too many programs that won't work if the user is not an administrator on the machine. The normal vendor solution? Make the user an admin. Usually this is caused by the bad coding practice of the developers having admin access on their computers, which really ticks me off. If a software package only runs as administrator, then it's badly written. We can usually develop some selective permissions to make such software work without giving the user admin, but it's always a PITB.

https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-11/282995/first-rust-code-shows-up-in-the-windows-11-kernel

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