Rare computer relic confirmed to be major discovery
Jan 7, 2026, 6:00 AM
A University of Utah research team's rare find is being called a huge, historically significant discovery after the Computer History Museum verified the relic is a UNIX Version 4 operating system. (Photo courtesy: Jon Duerig)
(Photo courtesy: Jon Duerig)
SALT LAKE CITY — A University of Utah research team’s rare find in a storage closet is being called a huge, historically significant discovery after experts at the Computer History Museum verified its contents.
Jon Duerig, one of the university engineering research associates, carefully packed up a copy of a significant early computer operating system tape and drove it to the museum in Mountain View, CA. That’s where his team learned that what they discovered was the real deal.
Experts at the museum found the tape was indeed a copy of the UNIX Version 4 operating system, which paved the way for operating systems like macOS.
Before this discovery, they thought this was lost.
Unpacking the mystery
Duerig carefully wrapped the tape in a static safe bag.
Once at the museum, they added lubricant to minimize friction on the tape while it’s read.
Given its age and where it was stored, they weren’t sure how successful they’d be with recovery of the tape’s contents. It turns out, only a few blocks on the tape were corrupted and later fixed.
The tape showed source code, which School of Computing professor Rob Ricci said is like a blueprint for the way we use computers today.
“They have a special mechanism where they have an old legacy tape reader, but they actually connect it, they actually have logic probes to read the raw analog signals off of it instead of having it try to interpret the tape itself,” Duerig said.
They found out the tape was in a very good condition, especially considering it dates back to the 1970’s and it’s been in a storage closet in Utah for a long time.
They made copies of it and uploaded it to the internet. Within hours thousands had downloaded and analyzed the tape.
“The coolest thing is that anybody, anywhere in the world can now access this, right? People can go on the internet archive and download the raw tape file and simulate running it,” Duerig said. “People have posted browsable directory trees of the whole thing.”
One of the museum’s directors said the tape’s recovery marked a big day for the museum
“One of the things that was pretty exciting to us is that just that there is this huge community of people around the world who were excited to jump on the opportunity to look at this piece of history,” Ricci said. “And it was really cool that we were able to share that.”
Duerig said while there weren’t many comments or footnotes from the programmers of that time, they did discovery more unexpected content having to do with Bell Labs on the tape.
“There were survey results of them actually asking survey questions of their employees at these operator centers,” he said.
The team brought the tape back to the university. Once the new engineering building is complete, they plan to have a display for this rare computer relic.
