In 1997 a set of DEC tapes were provided by Dennis Ritchie, as historical artifacts for those interested in the gestation of the UNIX operating system. The resulting archive files have recently been analysed by [Yfeng Gao], who has succeeded in recovering a working UNIX version from 1972. What makes it particularly interesting is that this is not a released version, instead it’s a work in progress sitting somewhere between versions 1 and 2. He’s therefore taken the liberty of naming it “V2 Beta”.

If you happen to have a PDP-11/20 you should be able to run this operating system for yourself, and for those of us without he’s provided information on which emulator will work. The interesting information for us comes in the README accompanying the tapes themselves, and in those accompanying the analysis. Aside from file fragments left over from previous users of the same tape, we learn about the state of UNIX time in 1972. This dates from the period when increments were in sixtieths of a second due to the ease of using the mains power frequency in a PDP, so with a 32-bit counter they were facing imminent roll-over. The 1970-01-01 epoch and one second increments would be adopted later in the year, but meanwhile this is an unusual curio.

If you manage to run this OS, and especially if you find anything further in the files, we’d love to hear. Meanwhile, this is not the oldest UNIX out there.

PDP-11/20 image: Don DeBold, CC BY 2.0.

The MP3 file format was always encumbered with patents, but as of 2017, the last patent finally expired. Although the format became synonymous with the digital music revolution that started in the late 90s, as an audio compression format there is an argument to be made that it has long since been superseded by better formats and other changes. [Ibrahim Diallo] makes that very argument in a recent blog post. In a world with super fast Internet speeds and the abstracting away of music formats behind streaming services, few people still care about MP3.

The last patents for the MP3 format expired in 2012 in the EU and  2017 in the US, ending many years of incessant legal sniping. For those of us learning of the wonders of MP3 back around ’98 through services like Napster or Limewire, MP3s meant downloading music on 56k dialup in a matter of minutes to hours rather than days to weeks with WAV, and with generally better quality than Microsoft’s WMA format at lower bitrates. When portable media players came onto the scene, they were called ‘MP3 players’, a name that stuck around.

But is MP3 really obsolete and best forgotten in the dustbin of history at this point? Would anyone care if computers dropped support  for MP3 tomorrow?

Alternatives

It’s hard to disagree with [Ibrahim]’s point that MP3 isn’t quite as important anymore. Still, his argument of AAC being a good alternative to MP3 misses that the AAC format is also patent-encumbered. Specifically, there’s a patent license for all manufacturers and developers of “end-user codecs,” which involves per-unit pricing. Effectively, every device (computer, headphones, smartphone, etc.) incurs a fee. That’s why projects like FFmpeg implement AAC and other encumbered formats while leaving the legal responsibilities to the end-user who actually uses the code.

While FLAC and Vorbis (‘ogg’) are truly open formats, they’re not as widely supported by devices. Much like VGA, MP3 isn’t so much sticking around because it’s a superior technological solution but because it Just Works^® anywhere, unlike fancier formats. From dollar store MP3 players to budget ‘boomboxes’ to high-end audio gear, they’ll all playback MP3s just fine. Other formats are likely to be a gamble, at best.

This compatibility alone means that MP3 is hard to dislodge, with formats like Ogg Vorbis trying to do so for decades and still being relatively unknown and poorly supported, especially when considering hardware implementations.

Audio Quality

Since the average person is not an audiophile who is concerned with exact audio reproduction and can hear every audio compression artefact, MP3 is still perfectly fine in an era where the (MP2-era) Bluetooth SBC codec is what most people seem to be content with. In that sense, listening to 320 kbps VBR MP3 files with wired headphones is a superior experience over listening to FLAC files with the Bluetooth SBC codec in between.

This leads to another point made by [Ibrahim]. The average person does not deal with files anymore. Many people use online applications for everything from multimedia to documents, which happily abstract away the experience of managing file formats. Yet, at the same time, there’s a resurgence in interest in physical media and owning a physical copy of content, which means dealing with files.

We see this also with MP3 players. Even though companies like Apple abandoned their iPod range and Sony’s current Walkmans are mostly rebranded Android smartphones with the ‘phone’ part stripped out, plenty of portable media players are available brand-new. People want portable access to their media in any format.

Amidst this market shift back to a more basic, less online focus, the MP3 format may not be as visible as it was even a decade ago, but it is by no means dead.

These days, rolling your own MP3 player is almost trivial. We’ve seen some fairly small ones.

For many people of a certain age, the DEC VAX was the first computer they ever used. They were everywhere, powerful for their day, and relatively affordable for schools and businesses. These minicomputers were smaller than the mainframes of their day, but bigger than what we think of as a computer today. So even if you could find an old one in working order, it would be a lot more trouble than refurbishing, say, an old Commodore 64. But if you want to play on a VAX, you might want to get a free membership on DECUServe, a service that will let you remotely access a VAX in all its glory.

The machine is set up as a system of conferences organized in notebooks. However, you do wind up at a perfectly fine VAX prompt (OpenVMS).

What can you do? Well, if you want a quick demo project, try editing a file called NEW.BAS (EDIT NEW.BAS). You may have to struggle a bit with the commands, but if you (from the web interface) click VKB, you’ll get a virtual keyboard that has a help button. One tip: if you start clicking on the fake keyboard, you’ll need to click the main screen to continue typing with your real keyboard.

Once you have a simple BASIC program, you can compile it (BASIC NEW.BAS). That won’t seem to do anything, but when you do a DIR, you’ll see some object files. (LINK NEW) will give you an executable and, finally, RUN NEW will pay off.

Some quick searches will reveal a lot more you can do, and, of course, there are also the conferences (not all of them are about VAX, either). Great fun! We think this is really connected to an Alpha machine running OpenVMS, although it could be an emulator. There are tons of emulators available in your browser.