ndrosen

The weird thing was how tremendously relieved I was after it was over! My voice recovered almost immediately - I didn't lose it, it just dropped an octave or so - and my energy came back almost entirely. My back is still massively sore, but that's another matter entirely. I think perhaps that I began mourning him as soon as he entered ICU and that I didn't realize it.

This evening, after stopping at an old friend's open house/party on the way out of town, I heard to Tucson to spend the night. It's maybe a quarter of the way or so to Cloudcroft. And the hotel is past the downtown area, makes it much easier getting out of Tucson - not that it's that difficult, especially given the much lighter Christmas Day driving.

The funeral went well, with one massive surprise. I expect my cousin Ron - who is a preacher - to give a little talk. And instead I ended up giving an extemporaneous eulogy for 20 minutes which went very, very well. I kinda wish it was recorded. I received several compliments on it.

Maybe me delivering the eulogy is part of the relief.

So today I'm off to the U-Haul where I'm storing his truck and camper trailer, I have to move it, also a woman is coming by to inspect it, she's interested in buying it. Can't do the inspection until 30 days after he dies, at that point it can be re-titled. After that I have some errands, then back to where I'm staying to finish packing, get some more rest then head out.

Far too much fun.

I will leave you with this. We wanted a poem for the little handout pamphlet for the grave-side service, and Russet and I didn't like any of the canned ones that the funeral home had available. She started surfing on her phone for ones written by or about gold miners/mining and found an absolutely perfect one! We dropped the third verse and cut down on the fourth and ended up with this. It does a very good job of encapsulating a lot about my brother:

The Men That Don't Fit In

There's a race of men that don't fit in,
A race that can't stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
    And they roam the world at will.

They range the field and they rove the flood,
    And they climb the mountain's crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
    And they don't know how to rest.

If they just went straight they might go far;
    They are strong and brave and true;
But they're always tired of the things that are,
    And they want the strange and new.

And each forgets that his youth has fled,
    Forgets that his prime is past,
Till he stands one day, with a hope that's dead,
    In the glare of the truth at last.

He's a rolling stone, and it's bred in the bone;
    He's a man who won't fit in.

-Robert W. Service (condensed)

A tarball is an old compression format that predates zip files, it was used in Ye Olde Dayes to archive a whole bunch of files into one big humongoid file for convenience.

Anyway, it looks like recovery of the tape was successful! With everything going on in my life, I don't have the ability to dig into the story right now, just wanted to get this out for my fellow geeks. Here's the Slashdot summary that you can dive into if you like:

Archive.org now has a page with "the raw analog waveform and the reconstructed digital tape image (analog.tap), read at the Computer History Museum's Shustek Research Archives on 19 December 2025 by Al Kossow using a modified tape reader and analyzed with Len Shustek's readtape tool." A Berlin-based retrocomputing enthusiast has created a page with the contents of the tape ready for bootstrapping, "including a tar file of the filesystem," and instructions on dumping an RK05 disk image from tape to disk (and what to do next).

Research professor Rob Ricci at the University of Utah's school of computing posted pictures and video of the tape-reading process, along with several updates. ("So far some of our folks think they have found Hunt The Wumpus and the C code for a Snobol interpreter.") University researcher Mike Hibler noted the code predates the famous comment "You are not expected to understand this" — and found part of the C compiler with a copyright of 1972.

The version of Unix recovered seems to have some (but not all) of the commands that later appeared in Unix v5, according to discussion on social media. "UNIX wasn't versioned as we know it today," explains University of Utah PhD student Thalia Archibald, who researched early Unix history (including the tape) and also worked on its upload. "In the early days, when you wanted to cut a tape, you'd ask Ken if it was a good day — whether the system was relatively bug-free — and copy off the research machine... I've been saying It's probably V5 minus a tiny bit, which turned out to be quite true."

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/12/21/020235/bell-labs-unix-tape-from-1974-successfully-dumped-to-a-tarball