Redazione RHC : 10 November 2025 21:36
A rare find from the early days of Unix may take researchers back to the very origins of the operating system.
A magnetic tape labeled ” UNIX Original From Bell Labs V4 (See Manual for format) ” was discovered at the University of Utah: likely an original copy of UNIX Fourth Edition, created at Bell Labs around 1973.
Professor Robert Ricci of the Kahlert School of Computing announced it in a post on Mastodon . He said the tape was found by employees cleaning out a warehouse. The professor recognized the handwriting on the label as that of his supervisor, Jay Lepreau , who died in 2008.
If the tape’s signature matches its contents, the discovery has historical significance: only a few fragments of UNIX V4 remain , some source code and manual pages , as well as the “Programmer’s Manual ” from November 1973.
It was in the fourth edition that the Unix kernel and basic utilities were rewritten in C for the first time, marking a turning point in the history of operating systems.
Ricci emphasized that the recovered tape will be donated to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. According to Google Maps, the trip from Utah to the museum is 770 miles, or about a 12-hour drive.
The professor clarified that a staff member will personally deliver the find, rather than sending it by mail, to avoid damage.
The team later discovered that the tape had most likely reached the university in the 1970s, to Martin Newell , the same researcher who created the famous “Utah Teapot”, which became an iconic 3D object in computer graphics.
Al Kossow, curator of the Bitsavers software archive and a museum employee, will lead the data recovery effort. He announced on the TUHS mailing list that he intends to read the information using a multichannel analog-to-digital converter, storing the data in approximately 100 GB of RAM, and then processing it with Readtape, a program written by engineer Len Shustek.
According to Kossow, the 360-meter-long 3M tape, likely a nine-track tape (a similar medium dating back to the 1970s), is frequently digitized successfully. In another letter to the TUHS, he emphasized that the find is so rare that he will put it at the top of his priority list.
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