A team at the University of Utah has stumbled onto what may be one of the rarest artifacts in modern computing history: a 1973 UNIX operating system tape that was long thought to be lost. The tape, discovered in a storage room by research associate Aleks Maricq of the Flux Research Group, could shed new light on how early UNIX shaped today’s operating systems, including Linux and macOS.
Maricq says the find is extraordinary because so few copies ever left Bell Labs. “UNIX back then was only sent to about 20 people outside Bell Laboratories,” he explained. “The fact that we found a version at all is pretty astonishing.”
A Direct Link to Computing’s Early Pioneers
According to professor Rob Ricci from the Kahlert School of Computing, this particular tape appears to trace back to computer graphics pioneer Martin Newell, known for creating the iconic “Utah teapot.” Researchers believe Newell requested a copy directly from UNIX co-creator Ken Thompson, making this tape a direct artifact of early collaboration between Bell Labs and Utah’s computer science community.
Ricci notes that UNIX v4 served as a conceptual template for how we still interact with computers decades later. Its architecture and design choices deeply influenced the systems that power servers, laptops and mobile devices around the world.
A Fragile Time Capsule That May Be Hard to Read
Despite the excitement, the team hasn’t yet seen what’s actually on the tape. They currently lack the specialized hardware needed to read a 1970s UNIX reel safely. There’s also no guarantee the data has survived intact.
“We don’t actually know if the contents of the tape are readable,” Maricq said. “We don’t know if it has been overwritten. Recovery is going to be quite an ordeal.”
To give the relic its best chance, the researchers are driving it to California rather than flying, concerned that airport scanners and radiation might damage the aging magnetic media. Their destination is the Computer History Museum, a leading institution dedicated to preserving and restoring historic computing artifacts, where experts will attempt a careful read of the tape.
You can learn more about the institution hosting the recovery effort via the official Computer History Museum website, and more about the university team behind the discovery on the University of Utah site.
What They Hope to Find Inside
Research associate Jon Duerig says the most valuable treasure may not be the code itself, but the comments and human traces embedded in it.
“What I’m hoping for is to get a glimpse at what the humans did,” he said. “The comments are like footnotes in the design. The computer ignores them, but for us they’re windows into how the original developers thought.”
If the tape is readable, it could provide:
- Original source code for a historic UNIX release
- Developer comments that reveal how decisions were made
- Unseen variations or tools that never made it into later distributions
Such details could help historians, engineers and open-source enthusiasts better understand how early system designers approached problems that still matter today: portability, multitasking, file systems and user interaction.
Why This Matters Beyond Nostalgia
For Ricci, the discovery is more than a nostalgic curiosity. He sees it as a way to connect past and future in computing.
“It’s really valuable to look back at where we came from and how things ended up the way they are,” he said. “That perspective helps us think more clearly about the moment we’re in now, and how we want to evolve computing for the future.”
Once the reading and recovery work is done, Maricq hopes the tape itself can be displayed in the university’s new engineering building as a physical reminder of Utah’s role in shaping the digital world.
If successful, this rare UNIX tape could become one of the most important primary sources for understanding how today’s operating systems grew from a compact, elegant codebase written more than half a century ago.
