this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
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449
Bell Labs 'Unix' Tape from 1974 Successfully Dumped to a Tarball (tech.slashdot.org)
submitted 1 week ago by sundray@lemmus.org to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] xthexder@l.sw0.com 107 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

I downloaded the tarball and had a look through it. Almost everything has source code included, which is pretty cool to see.

There's an entire C compiler from 1972, bootstrapped to be written in C. There was also a SNOBOL III compiler written in C, and a Fortran interpreter in C (only 462 lines!), and every unix command like ls,cd,echo,cat,grep,etc...

Unsurprisingly grep was written in assembly, but it's source is there.

There's also a games folder, but unfortunately these look like they're just binaries:
bj, chess, cubic, moo, ttt, wump
I'll have to load up a pdp11 emulator later to see what they are.

[–] coolmojo@lemmy.world 47 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Thank you for sharing the insights. I heard bj is a good game.

[–] nomecks@lemmy.wtf 46 points 1 week ago

Your mom loves it

[–] koella@lemmy.zip 22 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Nancy Reagan still has the high score

[–] massacre@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago

The word is that Julia Roberts took the title in the 90s

[–] Alexstarfire@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Monica Lewinsky is right on her heels.

[–] WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Hunt the Wumpus! A true classic.

(I'm serious. Try it. It's fun. I think it's in the bsdgames package.)

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Don't accidentally get the bdsmgames package instead, that's for a different kind of game.

[–] WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago

That one's sadly missing from most distros' repositories.

[–] HamsterRage@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 week ago

Wow. SNOBOL was one of the coolest, Stange languages.

[–] truthfultemporarily@feddit.org 90 points 1 week ago (5 children)

They wrote this without googling anything.

[–] mech@feddit.org 55 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They wrote this without autocompletion or syntax highlighting.

[–] Nanook@lemmy.zip 32 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They had PAPER NOTEBOOKS cheats

[–] bstix@feddit.dk 12 points 1 week ago

They also used the classic they knew what they were doing shortcut.

[–] bigfondue@lemmy.world 32 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

It's actually really easy when you get to make everything up as you go along. Like the transistor, and C, and Unix. That place was something else. The modern world was born in NJ

[–] WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The modern world was born in NJ

* looks at modern world *

Yeah, that tracks.

[–] bigfondue@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yea I thought about having 'for better for worse' in the post, but I lived in NJ so I'll let them have a little glory for once

[–] xthexder@l.sw0.com 27 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Hello World in 1974: echo.c

main(argc, argv)
int argc;
char *argv[];
{
	int i;

	argc--;
	for(i=1; i<=argc; i++)
		printf("%s%c", argv[i], i==argc? '\n': ' ');
}
[–] ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Bloat, they wasted an extra integer operation with argc--.

[–] xthexder@l.sw0.com 11 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I think it's actually quite elegant. No matter what it has to skip over argument 0 which will be the executable name echo.
If the subtraction was removed and the loop changed to <, it would then need to do an addition or subtraction inside the loop to check if it's the last argument.

[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The real question might be whether the compiler was smart enough to change var++ and var-- into ++var and --var when the initial values aren't needed.

As compiler optimisations go, it's a fairly obvious one, but it was 1974 and putting checks like that in the compiler would increase its size and slow it down when both space and time were at a premium.

[–] xthexder@l.sw0.com 7 points 1 week ago

Well, good news, the source code is right there. Someone can go check (it probably won't be me)

[–] a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

I was going to guess the same regarding the time period.

[–] surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

Or they just drop the =

[–] bigfondue@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

If you had a question about C, you would just consult K&R, and I don't mean the book

[–] ylph@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I worked at Bell Labs in the 90s, on wireless stuff, but we were still using the "in house" cfront compiler at the time, and would e-mail the compiler group, which included Bjarne Stroustrup, with issues sometimes. I learned C++ from his book before I joined Bell Labs, so that was a bit of a holy shit moment for sure for me then.

Kernighan, Ritchie and Thompson all still worked at Bell Labs as well at the time, but the company was huge then, and they were all in a different location from my team, so I never had any opportunities to meet them.

[–] bigfondue@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Have you read Unix: A History and a Memoir? I only started it, but the first chapter or two is just Kernighan talking about Bell Labs.

[–] BreadstickNinja@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

They were chatting with ELIZA and vibe coded the whole thing

[–] AllHailTheSheep@sh.itjust.works 37 points 1 week ago

my grandmother was a programmer at bell in the early 60s and 70s. really curious if she had hands on any of this. wish she was still around to ask lol.

you only realize how cool your grandparents were after they're gone.

[–] eleijeep@piefed.social 17 points 1 week ago

Tape image: https://archive.org/details/utah_unix_v4_raw

Extracted filesystem: http://squoze.net/UNIX/v4/README

[–] a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

TIL that slashdot is still around. XD

[–] Itdidnttrickledown@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago

Its been though several hands and the latest ones love floating bug the fuck out of you ads. I used to have a button on for decades to disable ads due to me being a regular contributor. The latest owners took that away.