On Wed, Jul 15, 2020 at 12:39 PM Jacob Goense <dugo@xs4all.nl> wrote:

> On 2020-07-15 00:53, Warner Losh wrote:
> > No tapes yet, but I thought people here would like to know.
>
>  From back when digging into this I vaguely recall there was
> corruption in the pl 0 tapes. Maybe you are on the brink of
> finding out why there are no pl 0 tapes ;)
>

You may be on to something. Patch 40, sent on Christmas day 1991, says:

        Several files in the /usr/src/games hierarchy are corrupt.  This
        likely happened about a year ago when the master tapes were being
        created on a system which had suffered a hardware problem (disc
        controller and/or memory).

        The affected files are:
                /usr/src/games/mille/end.c
                /usr/src/games/banner.c
                /usr/src/games/warp/{sig.c,smap.1,smp.5}
        If you have earlier 2.10.1BSD tapes the files may be recovered from
        them as the above files have not changed.

About 9 months later, around September 9, 1992, patch 80 was released,
which was just a remastering of all the patches to date:
        A master update kit has been created which will bring a base 2.11BSD
        distribution up to the current revision level (#78).  There is one
        later patch (#79) which is a trivial update to 'tftp', but it was
        made after this kit and so was not included.
(there's references to this coming kit in patch 72, released in late August
too).

Since 2.11BSD was released in March 1991, this is 15 months after the
initial release and would be all of the tapes made by USENIX going forward
after that point. It's unclear if the USENIX tapes were remaster after
patch 40 was issued 9 months after the original release or not (my
reconstruction assumes that this corruption never happened, btw). This
would give a small window in which to have ordered the tape to get an
original, perhaps? The files from patch 80 are available (and I have them),
but I haven't tried to see if they give me

But my 'no tapes yet' comment was that I've not built bootable 2.11BSD as
released/reconstructed tapes yet. I can't build the kernel. There's
something wonky with my reconstruction of the kernel config. It's not
consistent, and also fails to build a kernel that's small enough. But
there's likely to be more sleepless nights during which to ponder this
mystery.

Warner