Wesley, what I have of the sources is now up at www.bitsavers.org/MIT/trix
You might try contacting Dave Goddeau or Steve Ward to see what else
might still exist. Dave's MS thesis was on implementing an MP version
of the Trix kernel.
> From memory, there wasn't that much to it at the time RMS was looking at it.
what I should have said was there wasn't much done on Trix when RMS was looking
at it.
I should have this on one of my backup tapes. If RMS
is willing to send his tape to California, I have the
equipment to read his.
--
> It's interesting to consider what might've been if the GNU project
> hadn't got behind on the Hurd, and got up-to-speed with Trix.
--
If it wasn't tied up with Stanford licensing issues, the V Kernel would
have been a more mature system than Trix. From memory, there wasn't that
much to it at the time RMS was looking at it.
A quick update.
I have spl*() code as well as ia32 paging up in a small test kernel.
More testing remains to be done before integrating into 32I kernel.
Interrupt structure working well, as well as system call interface.
Still need copyin(), copyout(), fubyte(), fuibyte(), fuword(), etc., as
well as save(), resume(), etc.
Future progress will slow down a little. I have accepted an adjunct
teaching position, and will need to devote some otherwise free time to
preparing lessons. I still expect to have a preliminary running kernel
by New Years.
Pat
--
I've always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position. -- Pat
Conroy
First, an explanation - I'm interested in exhuming the Trix kernel - written
at MIT -, which for a while was to have been the GNU kernel, according to RMS
and the official FSF histories:
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU
I've been in contact with RMS - pestering the poor hacker ;) - and he's told
me he's got a tape that might have the Trix source on it, but he doesn't have
a tape drive or enough time. I'm in NZ, which is a bit of a long way away
from Mass., so I'm asking if anyone else in the vicinity is interested in
seeing one of the earlier 7th Ed. clones to be written?
I've got a number of reasons for wanting to read it - among them, the wish to
compare with Minix 0.0 -, putting the ubiquity of Unix during the early 80s
into perspective, and of course getting something to generalize any code I
write for 32VI.
So, if anyone's interested and in the vicinity, just get in touch with RMS and
let him know you're interested and have the time.
Thanks
Wesley Parish
P.S. It's interesting to consider what might've been if the GNU project
hadn't got behind on the Hurd, and got up-to-speed with Trix. Jokes like "Who
says you can't teach an old dog GNU TRIX?" spring immediately to mind ...
----- Forwarded message from Richard Stallman <rms(a)gnu.org> -----
Date: Mon, 01 Dec 2003 23:17:32 -0500
From: Richard Stallman <rms(a)gnu.org>
Reply-To: "rms(a)gnu.org" <rms(a)gnu.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Re: AI Lab Lispmachine source code
To: Wesley Parish <wes.parish(a)paradise.net.nz>
In this context it means, getting someone in the appropriate community who's
interested, around to check up on the tape.
Ok. I have the tape here.
----- End forwarded message -----
"I me. Shape middled me. I would come out into hot!"
I from the spicy that day was overcasked mockingly - it's a symbol of the
other horizon.
All,
I wrote:
> Looks liek I ran into a bunchof really old and useful tapes
> here. Two tapes come from Bell Labs, and seem to contain the
> official Mini UNIX (Sixth Edition) and the official UNIX,
> Seventh Edition.
Hmm. Well, the V7 tape is saved... took a bunch of retries, but
I managed to grab all of it.
The V6 (Mini-UNIX) tape was OK, but some !$%(!@#$%@# must have run
out of blank tapes, and decided to use this one.. it contains binary
data. Major bummer, sorry :(
Still working on the 2.8BSD tape, which needs more work. I also
have to work on Christian Corti's tapes.. now that I have a working
800bpi SCSI drive, I actually *can* :) [thanks Walter!]
Images will be sent off to the PUPS archive.
Cheers,
Fred
Hi all,
I thought that you possibly could be interested in
two projects, a small one that I did over a year ago
and a more recent one, which is currently under active
development.
In order to become acquainted with the old UNIX sources
as well as the behaviour of such a system running on old
(but simulated) hardware I figured out how to feed Keith
Bostic's original v7 tape images into Robert M. Supnik's
PDP-11 simulator so that the original bootstrap procedure
(described in "Setting Up Unix - Seventh Edition") could
be carried out exactly as written. In addition to that I
wrote a little program which traverses the root directory
of the simulated disk and extracts its contents recursively
(creating the same structure and files in the host's file
system). I copied all the needed software and a HOWTO into
a distribution package which can be found at
http://telexx.mni.fh-giessen.de/PDP11-UNIX
I did this little project as a "warm-up" for another and
quite a bit bigger project: porting UNIX Seventh Edition
to a modern RISC-like microprocessor (named ECO32). This
processor and a few peripherals are simulated for now,
but we intend to transform it into real hardware (we are
thinking of an FPGA implementation). These of course are
dreams of the future; what we have already is this:
- an ECO32 simulator
- an ECO32 back-end for the LCC compiler
- an ECO32 assembler/linker/loader
- a UNIX 7th Edition kernel ported to ECO32
We are working on a port of many of the commands; the
standard library and the shell are ready and waiting to
be integrated.
The homepage of this project is
http://telexx.mni.fh-giessen.de/ECO32
You are welcome to download the project in its current
state; don't expect anything user friendly though ;-)
If you have any questions regarding these two projects,
feel free to ask.
- Hellwig
In that case, do you have any objections to me siccing the TUHS(The Unix
Heritage Soc.)http://www.tuhs.org/ /PUPS(PDP11 Unix Preservation
Soc.)http://minnie.tuhs.org/PUPS/ people on to it?
It is something that interests us, and there'll be at least one list member
within driving range of Cambridge, Mass., with plenty of time to examine the
tape.
I'll cc' this ove to those lists and let anyone who's interested, get in touch
with you.
Thanks heaps.
Wesley Parish
Quoting Richard Stallman <rms(a)gnu.org>:
> I don't know where to find a copy of TRIX. I saw a cartridge tape
> recently that has some Nu machine software, and might have TRIX,
> but I don't know. I don't have a drive to read the tape with
> or the time to do it.
>
"I me. Shape middled me. I would come out into hot!"
I from the spicy that day was overcasked mockingly - it's a symbol of the
other horizon.