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 -----