Resurrecting the 1972 UNIX V2 'Beta'
2025-02-19
A researcher successfully recovered a working 1972 UNIX V2 beta system from magnetic tapes. This version differs from its predecessors in kernel size and a.out format support, considered an early beta of V2. While bootable on aap's PDP-11/20 emulator, it fails on others. Through a series of clever steps, the researcher created a bootable disk image and shared it publicly. This discovery provides invaluable material for researching the evolution of early UNIX systems.
Tech
UNIX history