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turgid [soylentnews.org] writes:

The Register reports [theregister.com] that UNIX V4, the first with the kernel written in C, has been recovered, restored and run.

The source code and binaries were recovered from a 1970s-vintage nine-track tape and posted to the Internet Archive where it can be downloaded.

It's very small: it contains around 55,000 lines of code, of which about 25,000 lines are in C, with under 1,000 lines of comments. But then, the late Dennis M. Ritchie and co-creator Ken Thompson were very definitely Real Programmers, and as is recorded in ancient wisdom: "Real Programmers don't need comments – the code is obvious."

For those who don't already know:

UNIX started out as a quick hack by two geniuses in their spare time, so that they could use a spare computer – an extremely rare thing in the 1960s – to run a simulation game flying the player around a 2D of the Solar System that one of them had written. It was called Space Travel.

Original Submission