10 Mar
2019
10 Mar
'19
1:31 p.m.
I noticed that the TUHS archive does not include a 4.1BSD distribution.
Also, while poking around the net, I've found a number of purported
tape images of 4.1BSD dated 7/10/1981 that look to me to a little sketchy,
since most contain files dated well into 1982.
So it appears to me that 4.1BSD is semi-lost.
While googling all this, I discovered that the School of Computer Science
and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin has an online archive catalog
which lists a couple of 4.1BSD distribution tapes in the "John Gabriel Byrne
Computer Science Collection".
https://scss.tcd.ie/SCSSTreasuresCatalog/
Perhaps someone from TUHS who lives near Dublin could investigate and
see if images can be made of these tapes?
10 Mar
10 Mar
5:24 a.m.
On Sun, Mar 10, 2019 at 6:52 PM Mike Haertel <tuhs(a)ducky.net> wrote:
Also, while poking around the net, I've found a
number of purported
tape images of 4.1BSD dated 7/10/1981 that look to me to a little sketchy,
since most contain files dated well into 1982.
Thanks Mike, you've raised an interesting question as to whether there
is an original (untainted) 1981 4.1BSD release available? I see that
the easily found distribution has modifications running into 1982.
Berkeley 4.1 VAX/UNIX (Amnesia-Vax)
login: root
Last login: Sun Jan 21 18:57:55 on console
Welcome to Berkeley Vax/UNIX (4.1bsd revised 1 Sept. 1981)
Erase is delete
Kill is control-U
# ls -l /
total 795
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 57 Mar 18 1981 .cshrc
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 90 Mar 21 1981 .login
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 99 Apr 30 1981 .profile
drwxr-xr-x 2 root 32 Mar 15 1981 arch
drwxrwxrwx 2 root 160 May 10 1982 bill
...elided...
On this page: http://gunkies.org/wiki/4.1_BSD
the file references
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/bits/UCB_CSRG/4.1_BSD_19810710.zip
and that has files from Feb-1982.
The Trinity College appears to be cataloguing many interesting
software artefacts. I would be interested in some of the other items
they show on their web-page.
5:18 p.m.
Nigel Williams wrote:
Mike Haertel wrote:
That's what I have been using for testing the MIT Chaosnet patches.
If it's no good, I'd like to know.
Also, while poking around the net, I've
found a number of purported
tape images of 4.1BSD dated 7/10/1981 that look to me to a little sketchy
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/bits/UCB_CSRG/4.1_BSD_19810710.zip 
11 Mar
11 Mar
2:55 a.m.
On Sun, Mar 10, 2019 at 5:49 AM Lars Brinkhoff <lars(a)nocrew.org> wrote:
Nigel Williams wrote:
There's also
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/bits/BSD/BSD4.1_bootable.tap.gz which I
just noticed...
Warner
Mike Haertel wrote:
> Also, while poking around the net, I've found a number of purported
> tape images of 4.1BSD dated 7/10/1981 that look to me to a little
sketchy
That's what I have been using for testing the MIT Chaosnet patches.
If it's no good, I'd like to know.
4:53 a.m.
Warner Losh writes:
There's also
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/bits/BSD/BSD4.1_bootable.tap.gz which I
just noticed...
Warner
That tape image is has 3 files in it:
The first consists of a bunch of 1024-byte records followed by a
single 512-byte record. It may be a boot loader.
The second is a file system dump. I haven't attempted to examine
its contents yet.
The third is a tar of /usr, with absolute pathnames for all files
in it.
The tar archive truncates abruptly in the middle of a Franz Lisp
manual source file, which it is trying to extract somewhere under
/usr/tape1/.
Some of the directories in the tar archive have modification times
in 1982, but all of the files in the tar archive are 1981 or earlier.
If you ignore /usr/tape1/* and look only at the earlier files in the
tar archive, it appears it might be a legitimate copy of 4.1BSD as
of Aug 31, 1981. In particular, there is a large cluster of files
with modification times of 7/9/1981, and fewer than 25 files newer
than that. The newest file (excluding the /usr/tape1 material)
is 8/31/1981.
6:25 a.m.
On 3/10/19 3:53 PM, Mike Haertel wrote:
Warner Losh writes:
> There's also
> http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/bits/BSD/BSD4.1_bootable.tap.gz which I
> just noticed...
Likely a Memorex sticky tape that stripped its oxide when I tried to read it.
These were read a long time before I had a tape oven.
I've not dug back into what I still have from the 4BSD days, or in the CHM
archives since I thought Kirk had this all covered.
7:15 a.m.
Al Kossow writes:
On 3/10/19 3:53 PM, Mike Haertel wrote:
I've double-checked, and disk1/4.1 from Kirk's archive is definitely 4.0,
(with the addition of a 4.0.upgrade directory taken from a 4.1 distribution).
As far as online 4.1 tape images are concerned, I did a bit more investigating:
AFAICT this file: http://bitsavers.org/bits/BSD/BSD4.1_bootable.tap.gz appears
to be the closest online thing to a 7/10/1981 version of 4.1.
This file: http://bitsavers.org/bits/UCB_CSRG/41bsd_7-10-81.tap contains files
with modification times up through June 1982.
Neither of these include the corresponding /usr/doc or /usr/ingres (which would
have been on the distribution tape #2). Those seem to be missing altogether.
Warner Losh writes:
> There's also
> http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/bits/BSD/BSD4.1_bootable.tap.gz which I
> just noticed...
Likely a Memorex sticky tape that stripped its oxide when I tried to read it.
These were read a long time before I had a tape oven.
I've not dug back into what I still have from the 4BSD days, or in the CHM
archives since I thought Kirk had this all covered. 
11:46 a.m.
I'm not blaming anyone, as a matter of fact I'm super grateful for all the hard
work that is done to preserve what is there on these old tapes, but it's super
frustrating that we don't have good historical artifacts. And that tapes are so
seemingly useless.
I'm 100% out of my element, but is there a kyrolux like device for tapes? It seems
so many 'cut short' and yet I image there is most certainly more tape on the
spool.
I'm just a n00b, and apologize if it's a dumb thing to ask.
I linked to the bitsaver stuff when writing on the 4.1 stuff as they booted in simh and
gave a seemingly working system, but clearly they are missing stuff. I guess I need to
figure out the sccs and how to find the latest date on a tape and work from that date
based on the CD archive.
But thanks again, Al for your bits that has me hooked on looking at the latest digital
artifacts!!
I still have hope that more of TripOS eventually surfaces
On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 8:26 AM +0800, "Al Kossow" <aek(a)bitsavers.org>
wrote:
On 3/10/19 3:53 PM, Mike Haertel wrote:
Warner Losh writes:
> There's also
> http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/bits/BSD/BSD4.1_bootable.tap.gz which I
> just noticed...
Likely a Memorex sticky tape that stripped its oxide when I tried to read it.
These were read a long time before I had a tape oven.
I've not dug back into what I still have from the 4BSD days, or in the CHM
archives since I thought Kirk had this all covered.
11:28 p.m.
I contacted Kirk. He was surprised to learn that the copy of 4.1 in
his CSRG archive is not, in fact, 4.1.
Also he says that the contents of the existing CSRG archive disks
are all he has; apparently the dumps of old distribution tapes to
disk were hastily done on the way out the door as CSRG was being
shut down.
He suggested I inquire with TUHS for a copy, so evidently he does not
read this list. His other suggestion was to reconstruct from SCCS files.
I think at this point the preservation community has essentially all
the bits from tape 1 of the 7/10/81 release (in somewhat scattered
form needing to be reassembled into a usable distribution tape image).
The contents of tape 2 seem to be altogether lost (unless someone is
able to recover it from surviving media).
11:38 p.m.
Other than for history's sake, I don't see the value of 4.1, it wasn't
a great release (even though Masscomp did their changes to 4.1c if I
remember correctly. Clem?). 4.2 was the first release that I remember
being pretty solid and 4.3 improved on that.
On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 10:28:23AM -0700, Mike Haertel wrote:
I contacted Kirk. He was surprised to learn that the
copy of 4.1 in
his CSRG archive is not, in fact, 4.1.
Also he says that the contents of the existing CSRG archive disks
are all he has; apparently the dumps of old distribution tapes to
disk were hastily done on the way out the door as CSRG was being
shut down.
He suggested I inquire with TUHS for a copy, so evidently he does not
read this list. His other suggestion was to reconstruct from SCCS files.
I think at this point the preservation community has essentially all
the bits from tape 1 of the 7/10/81 release (in somewhat scattered
form needing to be reassembled into a usable distribution tape image).
The contents of tape 2 seem to be altogether lost (unless someone is
able to recover it from surviving media).
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
12:41 a.m.
I think I have a true 4.1 tape in my archives but ... I'm not sure it's on
3M (Scotch media). Those are in sealed 3M tape boxes in the basement 10
tapes to a box, and difficult to get too. They have been kept reasonable
dry and mostly stable climate, which is why I keep them there not the
attic. So far every tape, I have pulled from there we have succeeded in
reading .. but I have not tried in a while because my triple density drive
has load issues which I have not had the time to chase. I also do not have
a tape oven [@Alan K . - I assume you made one. I'd love to hear your
experiences with it].
As for BSD 4.1 kernel really was 4.0 plus a ton of small changes #ifdef
FASTVAX [4.5 stuff is a little different than was reported the other day
-- close but not quite]. This was the work wnj did to demonstrate that
UNIX was within epsilon of VMS from a performance standpoint (i.e. the
beginning of the UCB/Stanford war of what was going to be the supported
system for Arpa). I'm 99.999% sure that the user level APIs are the
same, the difference is he dropped into assembler in places, rewrote a
number of internal routines etc. Basically, it tuned the c**p out of the
4.0 release to prove to DARPA that UNIX was just as fast or faster than
VMS.
Note that the userspace code between the two released were different
because time had marched on and more and more stuff was available and had
been placed in /usr/ucb; plus more and more of the original v7 commands had
been hacked/expanded. There really was not a lot of control of the
userspace at this point and CSRG did not yet exist. As a for instance, the
compilers and libraries had been hacked a great deal by a lot different
people so even if the foo.c was the same chances are the /bin/foo was
different binaries between the two systems [hey I wasn't a compiler person
and I had hacked on libc to fix a stdio bug was causing my thesis to go in
the toilet].
That said, 4.1BSD was the first really stable Vax code base and what a lot
of people ran. It was formal release a lot of people outside of BSD had it
both universities and commercial. There were copies at MIT, CMU, Standford,
Harvard, much less some of the big public school likes Michigan, Wisconson,
and Purdue. For instance, this is the kernel George Goble hacked on to
create the Purdue Dual processor Vax. We had it a Tektronix, I know HP
and IBM had it, and the original Marx brothers machines at AT&T Whippany
ran it. Dale's folks in Columbus had and I think ihnp4 [Indian Hill New
Products group] was a BSD 4.1 system. Plus, of course by the time I was
at Masscomp, that was what they had had. [Sun did too, but I don't think
they ever shipped anything with 4.1 BSD base. The original Sun OS was done
for them by Asa Romberger's folks and was based on V7/System III. Joy had
not come there yet].
As was reported the follow on to 4.1 BSD was to be supposed to 5.0 etc....
the naming stuff was described correctly in earlier email here. But all
of that was >>post<< 4.1BSD. Post 4.1BSD shipping, CSRG had been
formalized and now a project from the DARPA to support UNIX on new Vax
hardware and to add extensions. As was described they ended up using a
different naming scheme. Remember until that time, there was no formal
CSRG project. It was like ever other University, a group of people hacking
and swapping code changes with the reset of the Unix community.
So when the became a project and started to release things for DARPA is
when formal tracking started. CSRG's Alpha's [or release candidates in
today's terms] for these were called 4.1A, 4.1B, and 4.1C. 4.1A was
pretty stable, but IIRC was not quite as radical is 4.1B (their's were
signals got hacked and a number of new system calls added). 4.1B was not
particularly stable and as Larry suggested 4.1C actually was usable and did
not crash every day. IIRC The actual 4.2 BSD release took about a 9-12
months after 4.1C before Sam finally pushed it out the door [and I think
wnj had left for Sun by then].
As Larry's comments about Masscomp, the original RTU 1.0 used a 4.1BSD
kernel with a bunch of System III as the base (which really was an Alpha
release for MSCP). It shipped to a handful of customers, but it was easy
to crash (But we got it out the door and people loved it actually). The
first version that actually was fairly stable was RTU 1.0A which was a
mash-up of the earlier work using 4.1 plus tjt and I applying a lot of 4.1C
to it (as I had brought 4.1C with me from UCB). RTU 1.1 or maybe 1.2 was
when 4.2BSD was finally added. I created conditional symbolic links
before that because we used them to create the Universe stuff and I've
forgotten when that shipped.
Clem
ᐧ
On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 1:39 PM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
Other than for history's sake, I don't see
the value of 4.1, it wasn't
a great release (even though Masscomp did their changes to 4.1c if I
remember correctly. Clem?). 4.2 was the first release that I remember
being pretty solid and 4.3 improved on that.
On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 10:28:23AM -0700, Mike Haertel wrote:
I contacted Kirk. He was surprised to learn that
the copy of 4.1 in
his CSRG archive is not, in fact, 4.1.
Also he says that the contents of the existing CSRG archive disks
are all he has; apparently the dumps of old distribution tapes to
disk were hastily done on the way out the door as CSRG was being
shut down.
He suggested I inquire with TUHS for a copy, so evidently he does not
read this list. His other suggestion was to reconstruct from SCCS files.
I think at this point the preservation community has essentially all
the bits from tape 1 of the 7/10/81 release (in somewhat scattered
form needing to be reassembled into a usable distribution tape image).
The contents of tape 2 seem to be altogether lost (unless someone is
able to recover it from surviving media).
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
12:21 p.m.
On Tue, Mar 12, 2019 at 4:39 AM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
Other than for history's sake, I don't see
the value of 4.1
On the history side, I found having 4.1 BSD important when we were
recovering the build of a programming language on this version. As we
had the binary we wanted to be sure that when we re-compiled we could
confirm that the result was identical to the original. This was to
ensure that we had recovered the build environment as it was
originally. For that reason, I would urge preservationists to always
try to recover as many incremental versions as possible.
12:32 p.m.
I would also add that 4.1 also ties into research UNIX v8.
On the VAX (via SIMH) its bootstrapped from a 4.1 system.
David du Colombier's guide uses the 4.1 image I found and modified with some 4.2 to
get running on SIMH
http://9legacy.org/9legacy/doc/simh/v8
Not having 4.1 would have made this far more involved. 4.2 is no doubt a major Internet
milestone on the way to SunOS & 4.3 while 4.0/4.1 are important in a pre-tcpip focused
world.
Naturally I'm biased into thinking they are all important, but I know resources /time
are limited.
On Tue, Mar 12, 2019 at 2:22 PM +0800, "Nigel Williams"
<nw(a)retrocomputingtasmania.com> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 12, 2019 at 4:39 AM Larry McVoy wrote:
Other than for history's sake, I don't see
the value of 4.1
On the history side, I found having 4.1 BSD important when we were
recovering the build of a programming language on this version. As we
had the binary we wanted to be sure that when we re-compiled we could
confirm that the result was identical to the original. This was to
ensure that we had recovered the build environment as it was
originally. For that reason, I would urge preservationists to always
try to recover as many incremental versions as possible.
6:44 p.m.
Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
Other than for history's sake, I don't see
the value of 4.1, it wasn't
a great release (even though Masscomp did their changes to 4.1c if I
remember correctly. Clem?). 4.2 was the first release that I remember
being pretty solid and 4.3 improved on that.
I'm with Clem; we ran 4.1 at Georgia Tech and it was pretty solid.
The big changes in 4.2 were the fast file system, the networking, and
how signals worked.
The fast file system used more space on the disk for its metadata;
people who had nearly full disks on 4.1 didn't have enough room to
restore their filesystems with the change to 4.2!
Later on I ran two vaxen at the Emory U computing center with 4.2; they
were heavily (over)loaded. When 4.3 came out it had a huge amount of fixes
and performance tuning; when we switched to 4.3 + NFS from Mt. Xinu we
saw a big drop in the load. To this day I am convinced that the move to
4.3 kept us from having to buy more hardware.
Arnold
3:47 a.m.
On 3/10/19 10:46 PM, Jason Stevens wrote:
is there a kyrolux like device for tapes?
The problem is dropouts from either tape surface contamination or oxide loss, tape skew,
and tape stretch.
I've been working off and on with Len Shustek on analog digitization and recovery of
7 and 9 track tape
https://github.com/LenShustek/readtape
to try to deal with tape that has signal degradation
He and I use Saleae Pro Logic 16 USB 16-channel USB setups connected to the read amps of a
tape drive
I have a Linux box set up with 128gb of memory for data capture.
It is a time-consuming process, and I only resort to that for high-value problem
children.
23 Mar
23 Mar
11:50 p.m.
On Sun, 10 Mar 2019, Mike Haertel wrote:
>http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/bits/BSD/BSD4.1_bootable.tap.gz which I
>just noticed...
That tape image is has 3 files in it:
...
What tool did you use to extract or look at this tape image?
(I tried a v6 ar, and a modern NetBSD ar, cpio, tar, and restore. Maybe
I need an ar or tar from ~1981 ... file(1) reports it as a Maple help
database.)
24 Mar
24 Mar
10:19 a.m.
reed wrote:
Mike Haertel wrote:
What tool did you use to extract or look at this tape image?
"taperead" in http://github.com/brouhaha/tapeutils can extract files
from a tape image.
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/bits/BSD/BSD4.1_bootable.tap.gz which I
just noticed...
That tape image is has 3 files in it:
10 Mar
10 Mar
2:20 p.m.
Isn't 4.1 on Kirk McKusick's disks?
Mike Haertel <tuhs(a)ducky.net> wrote:
I noticed that the TUHS archive does not include a
4.1BSD distribution.
Also, while poking around the net, I've found a number of purported
tape images of 4.1BSD dated 7/10/1981 that look to me to a little sketchy,
since most contain files dated well into 1982.
So it appears to me that 4.1BSD is semi-lost.
While googling all this, I discovered that the School of Computer Science
and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin has an online archive catalog
which lists a couple of 4.1BSD distribution tapes in the "John Gabriel Byrne
Computer Science Collection".
https://scss.tcd.ie/SCSSTreasuresCatalog/
Perhaps someone from TUHS who lives near Dublin could investigate and
see if images can be made of these tapes?
9:50 p.m.
arnold(a)skeeve.com writes:
Isn't 4.1 on Kirk McKusick's disks?
McKusick's disks look sketchy to me too:
# cd /mnt/CSRG/disk1
# diff --exclude=.MAP -r 4.0 4.1 | grep -v 'not a regular file or directory'
Only in 4.0: 4.0.boot.Z
Only in 4.1: 4.0.upgrade
Only in 4.1: TAPE
Only in 4.1: boot.file
Only in 4.0/dev: cua0
Only in 4.0/dev: cua1
Only in 4.1/tmp: x.f
Only in 4.1/tmp: x.s
Only in 4.0/usr/src/lib/libpc: RANDOM.c
Only in 4.0/usr/src/lib/libpc: RANG4.c
Only in 4.0/usr/src/lib/libpc: READ4.c
Only in 4.0/usr/src/lib/libpc: READ8.c
Only in 4.0/usr/src/lib/libpc: READC.c
Only in 4.0/usr/src/lib/libpc: READE.c
Only in 4.0/usr/src/lib/libpc: READLN.c
Only in 4.0/usr/src/lib/libpc: RELEQ.c
Only in 4.0/usr/src/lib/libpc: RELNE.c
Only in 4.0/usr/src/lib/libpc: RELSGE.c
Only in 4.0/usr/src/lib/libpc: RELSGT.c
Only in 4.0/usr/src/lib/libpc: RELSLE.c
Only in 4.0/usr/src/lib/libpc: RELSLT.c
Only in 4.0/usr/src/lib/libpc: RELTGE.c
Only in 4.0/usr/src/lib/libpc: RELTGT.c
Only in 4.0/usr/src/lib/libpc: RELTLE.c
So it appears to me the only 4.1 material in his 4.1 tree is under the
4.1/4.0.upgrade directory.
The 4.0 and 4.1 trees on his disks are otherwise basically the same,
except for a handful of /usr/src/lib/libpc/*.c source files that appear
only in the 4.0 tree.
Or, perhaps the 4.0 tree is misidentified and is really a 4.1 tree, and
what is lost is 4.0?
Anyway, there definitely seems to be a missing link somewhere.
Mike
2:33 a.m.
On Sun, Mar 10, 2019 at 1:55 PM <arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote:
Mike Haertel <tuhs(a)ducky.net> wrote:
Keep in mind that BSD didn't really have releases. When you called up for a
tape, it wasn't made from some master tape, but rolled off from a system
that had right version on it. I know Kirk told me this once when I was
chatting with him about tapes, RMS and other things. Thje version control
wasn't quite as strict as things are today, so I'm not surprised there's
some variance in images from place to place around the net. We have SCCS,
and multiple images. I think the best we may be able to do is to do the
this was copied from that with these changes and produce a tree of
inheritance... IIRC, SCCS has issues with moved and removed files that
makes it hard to reconstruct things exactly with it. I know RCS and CVS had
these issues. The historical unix git repo has
remotes/origin/BSD-4-Snapshot-Development
remotes/origin/BSD-4_1_snap-Snapshot-Development
remotes/origin/BSD-4_1c_2-Snapshot-Development
branches. Also, version numbering was kinda hazy. Kirk has a big listing in
his house of 4.5 BSD. This is post the first 4BSD release, but not the 5BSD
release. They had thought they'd do a 5BSD, but they had all these
contracts with 4BSD in them, so they were basically forced to do 4.1BSD
instead, so the "4.5BSD" thing is basically an early version of what we
know know as 4.1BSD.... So between these two quirks, I'm not surprised
there's not an 'untainted' version of 4.1BSD around... I'm guessing
the
tape that has the July 1981 date on it was made in early 1982 and the extra
files with the weird dates are just an artifact of when the tape was made
and that people had used the 'master image' system in the mean time, if for
nothing else than logging into and running the make tape script :)
Warner
arnold(a)skeeve.com writes:
So can "someone" ping Kirk about this?
Isn't 4.1 on Kirk McKusick's disks?
McKusick's disks look sketchy to me too:
2099
days inactive
2113
days old
21 comments
10 participants
participants (10)
-
Al Kossow -
arnold＠skeeve.com -
Clem Cole -
Jason Stevens -
Larry McVoy -
Lars Brinkhoff -
Mike Haertel -
Nigel Williams -
reed＠reedmedia.net -
Warner Losh