OK, I was able to locate
2bsd.tar.gz and spencer_2bsd.tar.gz in the archive. Neither is an
installation tape. It appears that they are just tarballs of their
respective systems (there are very minor differences between the
two).
In the TAPE file in the tarball, it talks about reading the tar
program off of the tape using:
dd if=/dev/mt0 bs=1b skip=1 of=tar
Well, tar is definitely not located at that address, which implies
that the tarball isn't a distro tape. This note in the archive
used to read:
...
The remaining gzipped tar files are other 2BSD distributions supplied by
Keith Bostic, except for spencer_2bsd.tar.gz which came from Henry Spencer.
They do not contain installation tape images. The 2.9BSD-Patch directory
contains patches to 2.9BSD dated August 85, and again supplied by Keith Bostic.
...
now it reads:
...
2.11BSD 2.11BSD-pl195.tar is a copy of 2.11BSD at patch level 195, supplied
by Tom Ivar Helbekkmo. spencer_2bsd.tar.gz is a version of 2BSD which came
from Henry Spencer.
...
I recall having to do something with cont.a files, which are not present on these images. So, my questions is, does anyone know of or have an actual 2bsd tape/tape image?
Both of the 2bsd tapes you found are from the days when Berkeley just sent patches to the 7th Edition out. The 2.8BSD tape was the first one to have a kernel that was bootable from the tape. The 2BSD tapes originally had 2 files on them. The first one was a binary copy of tar that ran on V7. The second was a tarball of all the rest. As you discovered, they shipped with a label like:
Second Berkeley Software Tape
May 10, 1979 TAR 800BPI
%dd if=/dev/mt0 bs=1b skip=1 of=tar
%chmod 755 tar
% tar x
10000 blocks
but the 2bsd.tar.gz file has just the second file.
The spensor_2bsd.tar.gz has a tar binary in it: