1 Jan
2025
1 Jan
'25
3:46 a.m.
All, Yufeng Gao has done more amazing work at extracting binaries,
source code and text documents from the DECtapes that Dennis Ritchie
provided for the Unix Archive:
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Applications/Dennis_Tapes/
His latest e-mail is below. I've temporarily placed his attachments here:
https://minnie.tuhs.org/wktcloud/index.php/s/aWkck2Ljay6c5sB
He needs some help with formatting old *roff documents. If someone could offer
him help, that would be great. His e-mail address is yufeng.gao AT uq.edu.au
Cheers, Warren
----- Forwarded message from Yufeng Gao -----
Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2024
Subject: RE: UNIX DECtapes from dmr
Hi Warren,
Happy New Year! Here's another update. I found more UNIX bins on
another tape ('ken-sky'). They appear to be between V3 and V4. I have
attached them as "ken_sky_bins.tar". I have also attached an updated
tarball of the V2/V3 bins recovered from the 'e-pi' tape (with a few
names corrected), see "identified_v2v3_bins_r2.tar".
So far, the rough timeline of UNIX binaries (RTM hereinafter refers to
the exact version of the OS described by the preserved manuals) is as
follows:
Sys: V1 RTM <= unix-study-src < s1/s2 < V2 RTM < V3 RTM < nsys < V4
RTM
Bin: V1 RTM < s1/s2 < epi-V2 < epi-V3 < ken-sky-bins < V4 RTM
There is a possibility that the V2 bins from the 'e-pi' tape belong to
V2 RTM, as they're all PDP-11/20 bins with V2 headers. In contrast,
most of the bins from the s1/s2 tapes are V1 bins. Some of them are
identical to those from the 's2' tape, and if the timestamps from the
's2' tape can be trusted, they're from May/June 1972.
The V3 bins from the 'e-pi' tape are most likely from late 1972 or
early 1973, but no later than Feb 1973, as they've been overwritten by
files from Feb 1973. This suggests they're from a V3 beta, supported by
the fact that some features described in the V3 manual are missing. The
files were laid out in perfect alphabetical order on the tape.
The bins from the 'ken-sky' tape fall somewhere between V3 RTM and V4
RTM. The directory structure and other elements match the V3 manual, as
do the syscalls (e.g., the arguments for kill(2) differ between V3 and
V4, and these bins use the V3 arguments). The features, however, are
closer to V4. For example, nm(1) had already been rewritten in C and
matches the V4 manual's description. The assembler also matches the V4
manual in terms of the number of temp files, and the C compiler refers
to the assembler as 'nas.' The assembler is located physically between
files starting with "n" and "o," and the files around it follow a
weak
alphabetical order, so it is logical to assume that it was named "nas".
It is a bit difficult to version these binaries, especially without any
timestamps. The lines between versions for early UNIX are blurry, and
modern software versioning terms like "beta" and "RTM" don't
really
apply well. If these binaries are to be preserved (which I hope they
will be, even though the kernels are long gone), I'd put the V2 bins
from 'e-pi' under V2, the V3 bins from 'e-pi' under V3, and the
bins
from 'ken-sky' under V4 (I'd argue that nsys also falls under V4, as
the biggest change between V3 and V4 was the kernel being rewritten in C).
There are other overwritten files on the tapes, and I will address them
later. There are quite a few patents, papers, and memos in *roff
format, but I'm not entirely sure what to do with them. Among those, I
have picked out some V4 distribution documents and attached them as a
ZIP folder :-). If you know of ways to generate PDFs from these ancient
*roff files accurately, please lend a hand - I'm struggling to get
accurate results from groff.
Sincerely,
Yufeng
----- End forwarded message -----