Index of /Applications/Spencer_Tapes

Icon  Name                    Last modified      Size  Description
[PARENTDIR] Parent Directory                             -   
[   ] del.tar.gz              1998-03-17 02:52   10M  
[   ] unsw3.tar.gz            1998-03-17 06:26  2.7M  
[   ] tor79.tar.gz            1998-03-17 05:42  2.6M  
[   ] purdue.tar.gz           1998-03-17 05:12  1.7M  
[   ] uk1.tar.gz              1998-03-17 05:53  1.2M  

This directory contains a number of `anthology' tapes from old Unix
conferences, donated to the archive by Henry Spencer. Here's his
description of each tape.

With the exception of del.tar, which is an image of the original, most
of these tapes have been through format conversion to tar format. Because
pre-tar tape utilities seldom bothered preserving file dates during
extraction, the file dates are generally those of the format conversions. 

del.tar is the Delaware (June 1980) Usenix conference tape, containing
the conference distributions from the Delaware Boulder (Jan 1980), and
Toronto (June 1979) Usenix conferences. There's lots of different stuff
on them; they're anthologies with no unifying theme except Unix. 

[ Note, this tarball has a corrupt section in it. The pax(1) in FreeBSD 2.2.5
  is able to skip the bad section, but GNU tar isn't. Henry believes that
  this was a physical defect on an old tape, and he can't recover the
  missing bits. An alternative to skip over the bad section is:

	zcat del.tar.gz | dd bs=1024 skip=9100 | dd bs=515 skip=1 | tar vtf -
]

purdue.tar is an early distribution of Purdue's V6-based Unix
improvements (notably some early non-TCP/IP Unix networking). One file
includes a reference to a 1982 issue of Byte, but that appears to be just
a typo, because the tape seems to have been cut in late spring 1979 for
duplication at the June 1979 Usenix. sys/READ_ME has more info. 

tor79.tar is the conference distribution from the Toronto (June 1979)
Usenix conference, which *ought* to be identical with the Toronto part of
del.tar but I haven't checked that.

uk1.tar is another anthology tape, dated Jan 1978, from the UK. The
date means everything will be V5- or V6-based.

unsw3.tar is yet another anthology, this one Australian. I can't find a
README file, but some quick experimental grepping doesn't find any dates
later than 1977, so this one may be really early.