Downgrade today!
While cleaning a storage room, our staff found this tape containing #UNIX v4 from Bell Labs, circa 1973
Apparently no other complete copies are known to exist: https://gunkies.org/wiki/UNIX_Fourth_Edition
We have arranged to deliver it to the Computer History Museum
If you ever get a chance to goto the CHM, do it. Super cool.
Instructions unclear, goto considered harmful.
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD" 20 GOTO 10That’s the most functional and elegant code I’ve ever seen.
Me after a month of employer induced LLM usage
I hope they’re able to extract the data. I’d love to see it boot up.
Magnetic storage is pretty much the gold standard when it comes to massive amounts of long term offline data. Sure, it doesn’t last forever, but proper quality tape lasts for many decades.
Source: I work with tape drives, and the amount of data I’ve written to tape and sent off for long term storage is measured in petabytes.
I have a box of 5-1/4" floppies from mid eighties. Over 95% still worked fine a couple years ago.
I don’t think magnetic storage lasts that long. Even floppy disks become unreadable after sitting for 10 years in a box.
No they do not. Where did you get that piece of crap info from?
Most likely they’re thinking of VHS and audio tapes.
Where do people store these things? In a swamp?
From my box of floppy disks that where sitting in shelf since ~2000.
Were they sitting next to a bookshelf speaker?
Almost all my mid eighties floppies still work…
Good for you, I can find 40 year old disks that read fine.
Magnetic tape can last multiple decades. There’s no telling whether THIS magnetic tape lasted that long, but the medium is pretty hardy.
Keep 'em in a salt mine.
I recently dug up my father’s floppy disks. Stored in a dark dry attic. Each one contained about 10 photos of him on holidays and my birthday when i was 7. I had about 10 usable disks.
The disks are at least 25 years old. He died about 20 years ago.
It is true. Not all photos were saved but the disks held op really well!
The thing about floppies is they were mass produced with pressure to be the cheapest on the market for consumers. The newer the floppy, the more shit quailty it is and less likely to retain data. Tapes meant for enterprise storage meant for long term backups will be high quailty and has a pretty good chance of lasting decades.
Yeah if climate controlled they last a surprisingly long time. I’ve had 20-30 year old disks read ok. Honestly at this point I cant find a drive anywhere.
Yeah, I’m lucky nobody threw them out it the mean time.
It’s not a very desirable or trendy way of keeping data.
I suspect that if you throw resources at the problem, you can tolerate much more degradation than standard tape readers.
Magnetic tape can be pretty good. This specific tape I don’t know, but there’s a reason enterprises to this day STILL widely use magnetic tape to store archives.
Though, that may be because a single tape cassette can hold way more than a hard drive, and is cheaper. But I imagine they’d need to have longevity too.
Magnetic tape storage is pretty standard. depends on many factors but might read just fine.
And it is still better than Windows 11
And it is still better than Windows
11And it is still
better than Windows 11Is it tho? That’s a LONG time for magnetic bits to remain stable.
You could erase that tape and it’d still be better than Window 11
just received my new ssd. installing it this weekend, then I’m choosing a distro (or two), then testing phase. If so goes well, I plan to say bye bye to Windows before the end of the year.
Andit isstill better than Windows 11
Still a better love story than Windows 11
And my wife scoffs at my mild hoarding
I can play Sokoban IRL with all my stuff. I meant “have to”.
What does “700 GP 3200 FCI” means ? One should be the length of the tape I guess.
3200 fci is flux changes per inch, so basically the number of bits per inch of tape.
700GP is the style of tape. 1/2 inch, 9-tracks.
The length of the tape depends on the size/diameter of the reel it’s on. Going by the markings on the left it’s about 1000ft of tape.
Using those measurements, that’s about 38.4MB of storage on that tape
Well done
That is awesome. I guess there’s no way to clone it? Is there a virtual PDP-11/45?
I own a PDP-11 that still works. I’ll have to contact the museum to see if they want it. I bought it off of NYIT in 1999 for $200
They’ll want it I think!
Ping Usagi on Youtube
Thanks!
