"A tape-based piece of unique Unix history may have been lying quietly in storage at the University of Utah for 50+ years. The question is whether researchers will be able to take this piece of middle-aged media and rewind it back to the 1970s to get the data off. The news was posted to Mastodon by Professor Robert Ricci of the University of Utah's Kahlert School of Computing."
"We have some more information on this! One of @regehr's grad students did some excellent sleuthing and figured out that this was received by Martin Newell: https://archive.org/details/unix_news_july-30-1975/page/n9/mode/2up If that name sounds familiar to you, it's probably because his teapot is ubiquitous in computer graphics: https://graphics.cs.utah.edu/teapot/ So, this is the original copy of UNIX Fourth Edition received from AT&T by the inventor of the Utah Teapot - as seen in the original Windows NT OpenGL screensaver."
A nine-track tape reel labeled 'UNIX Original From Bell Labs V4 (See Manual for format)' was found in storage at the University of Utah and may date to circa 1973. The handwriting on the label matches Jay Lepreau, a former advisor who died in 2008. The University arranged to deliver the tape to the Computer History Museum. UNIX Fourth Edition is historically notable as the first version with the kernel and core utilities rewritten in C, but few complete copies are known to survive. A 1975 receipt shows Martin Newell received a copy from AT&T; Newell is known for the Utah Teapot in computer graphics. Researchers face uncertainty about whether data can be recovered from the middle-aged media.
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