55 votes

52 years later, only known copy of Unix v4 recovered from randomly found tape, now up and running on a system — first OS version with kernel and core utilities written in 'newfangled language' C

Posted by macleod
Tags: usa.ut, history, operating systems, c, programming, kernel, unix, university of utah.school of computing, 1970s, formats, tapes, recovery, retro, author.bruno ferreira, source.tomshardware
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/unix-v4-recovered-from-randomly-found-tape-at-university-of-utah-only-known-copy-of-first-os-version-with-kernel-and-core-utilities-written-in-c

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Published
Dec 24 2025

1 comment

  1. tauon
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    Oh man, that’s cool! Truly ancient Unix archeology ;-) I don’t feel like figuring out the download and archive extraction right now, but I wonder how much of the C still drops down to Assembly...

    Oh man, that’s cool! Truly ancient Unix archeology ;-)

    I don’t feel like figuring out the download and archive extraction right now, but I wonder how much of the C still drops down to Assembly because back then, that probably still seemed like the “easier”/more familiar language of the two…?

    4 votes