On Mon, 6 Apr 2020 at 18:12, Warren Toomey wrote: > Anybody feel up for a bit of an archaeology challenge? Warner Losh is > currently poking through a bunch of bits but not having much luck decoding > them correctly. I've put a copy here: > https://minnie.tuhs.org/Y5/Challenge/ > > If you can help, I'd suggest report major findings here, and we can use > the #TUHS channel in the ClassicCmp Discord server for chat. > > Here's what Warner has found out so far: > > It's quite interesting, but in a > format I've so far not been able to decode more than with emacs. > However, there's all kinds of wonderful here. This looks like it was a > dump from a VMS (or maybe similar DEC OS) ANSI tape. There's 4 datasets > of 2.5MB each. The first one appears to be a V5 tree of some sort (at > least it matches the V5 sources in places I can spot check in > Dennis_v5. The second block looks v6ish or maybe pwbish, but no kernel > sources. I don't think it's a continuation of the v5 stuff from the > first dataset. The third dataset is all binaries, as far as I can tell > so far, but things like mv and passwd. The 4th dataset appears to be > the dump of a VENIX-11 system, complete with source. > > The 3rd dataset appears to be a Venix system. At least it has venix and > venix.old in what looks like the root directory. Still trying to sort > out extracting files from these datasets. v7fs hates them, but I'm > almost positive that's what they are. > Looking at the first file as well as the later 512 byte files, this appears to have been made on an RT-11 system. There are entries for HDR1ZEROED.ZZZ which shows up in the RT-11 5.07 sources: http://www.kpxx.ru/DEC/PDP-11/Software/OS/RT-11/05.07/05.07.abl/Unpacked/DUPZMC.MAC . Unfortunately I have absolutely no experience with magtapes under RT-11 so I'm not currently sure how to proceed. -Henry