On 2020-07-15 00:53, Warner Losh wrote:
> No tapes yet, but I thought people here would like to know.
From back when digging into this I vaguely recall there was
corruption in the pl 0 tapes. Maybe you are on the brink of
finding out why there are no pl 0 tapes ;)
You may be on to something. Patch 40, sent on Christmas day 1991, says:
Several files in the /usr/src/games hierarchy are corrupt. This
likely happened about a year ago when the master tapes were being
created on a system which had suffered a hardware problem (disc
controller and/or memory).
The affected files are:
/usr/src/games/mille/end.c
/usr/src/games/banner.c
/usr/src/games/warp/{sig.c,smap.1,smp.5}
If you have earlier 2.10.1BSD tapes the files may be recovered from
them as the above files have not changed.
About 9 months later, around September 9, 1992, patch 80 was released, which was just a remastering of all the patches to date:
A master update kit has been created which will bring a base 2.11BSD
distribution up to the current revision level (#78). There is one
later patch (#79) which is a trivial update to 'tftp', but it was
made after this kit and so was not included.
(there's references to this coming kit in patch 72, released in late August too).
Since 2.11BSD was released in March 1991, this is 15 months after the initial release and would be all of the tapes made by USENIX going forward after that point. It's unclear if the USENIX tapes were remaster after patch 40 was issued 9 months after the original release or not (my reconstruction assumes that this corruption never happened, btw). This would give a small window in which to have ordered the tape to get an original, perhaps? The files from patch 80 are available (and I have them), but I haven't tried to see if they give me
But my 'no tapes yet' comment was that I've not built bootable 2.11BSD as released/reconstructed tapes yet. I can't build the kernel. There's something wonky with my reconstruction of the kernel config. It's not consistent, and also fails to build a kernel that's small enough. But there's likely to be more sleepless nights during which to ponder this mystery.
Warner