52 Year old data tape could contain Unix history

This is an incredible find. It would be amazingly cool if we could create an emulated environment for compiling and running Unix v4 from these sources.

Wild if we found out these early versions were rife with spyware and ads.

SIMH emulates the PDP-11 (along with a ton of other early mini/microcomputers). It should be possible to run whatever's extracted from the tapes on SIMH. For example, the members of the TUHS mailing list were able to get an even earlier set of UNIX sources from 1972 running again, see here for more info: https://github.com/DoctorWkt/unix-jun72

Or even worse, what if they vibe coded it?

For doing what?

This will be the linchpin that proves SCO was right all along.

For the same reason one visits a museum. If that doesn't make sense to you, then doing this won't either.

They were able to get an even earlier set of UNIX sources running on the SIMH PDP-7 emulator. SEVEN.

For me, it's a chance to experience what it was like to use and develop software on these systems back in the day. For example, lately I've been writing some small apps and adding new kernel features to a variant of V6 Unix running on my PDP-11/05. It's humbling to see what it really took to be productive on these systems.

For nostalgia sake. It's from the computing period when there was a great influx of good idea's but still a huge shortage in memory and storage.

It's really easy to run for yourself: https://github.com/DoctorWkt/pdp7-unix/

Don't expect it to do much, but it's fascinating if you're interested in OS history.

> a huge shortage in memory and storage

Maybe this explains why we have to call "creat" to "create" a file.

If you cannot learn from history, you'll have no future too, man.

Unfortunately, I am working for an aerospace manufacturer that runs VAX VMS on emulators (which are quite expensive). We also run an even older operating system, OS2200.

The original VMS system manager who moved from 7000 series hardware to emulation was somewhat inquisitive, and we did install VMS 7 on simh. He retired and passed away some years ago, and none of his replacements have wanted to touch simh. I find that apathy appalling.

That's why so many of these new age development tools, libraries and abstractions are such incredibly janky pieces of bloat that literally require what a few decades ago was supercomputers.

All downhill from here.

Given who wrote it, simh seems as close to an official VAX emulator as you are going to get.