I've assembled some notes from old manuals and other sources
on the formats used for on-disk file systems through the
Seventh Edition:
http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~norman/old-unix/old-fs.html
Additional notes, comments on style, and whatnot are welcome.
(It may be sensible to send anything in the last two categories
directly to me, rather than to the whole list.)
Hi,
I successfully made SIMH VAX-11/780 emulator run 32V, 3BSD and 4.0BSD.
Details are on my web site (thogh rather tarse):
http://zazie.tom-yam.or.jp/starunix/
Enjoy!
Naoki Hamada
nao(a)tom-yam.or.jp
> Does anything at all exist of PDP-7 Unics? All I know about is that
> there was a B language interpreter. Maybe a printout of the manual has
> survived?
There was no manual.
doug
Ok, the first question is:
Has anyone got Unix sysv running on PDP-11 via simh?
I downloaded some files from archive.org which included the file
'sys_V_tape' but so far I haven't got anywhere with it. Looks
interesting though.
Second question is:
What is the deal with Unix version 8? Except for the manuals v8 seems
to have disappeared into the twilight zone. Wikipedia doesn't say
much, only "Used internally, and only licensed for educational use".
So can we look at the source code? Was it sold in binary form only?
Ok, now the big question:
Does anything at all exist of PDP-7 Unics? All I know about is that
there was a B language interpreter. Maybe a printout of the manual has
survived?
Mark
Mark Longridge:
What is the deal with Unix version 8? Except for the manuals v8 seems
to have disappeared into the twilight zone. Wikipedia doesn't say
much, only "Used internally, and only licensed for educational use".
So can we look at the source code? Was it sold in binary form only?
=======
The Eighth Edition system was never released in any general way,
only to a few educational institutions (I forget the number but
it was no more than a dozen) under specific letter agreements that
forbade redistribution. It was never sold, in source or binary or
any other form; the tape included a bootstrap image and full source
code.
I was involved in all this--in fact one of the first nontrivial
things I did after arriving at Bell Labs was to help Dennis assemble
the tape--but that was more than 30 years ago and the details have
faded. The system as distributed ran only on the VAX-11/750 and
11/780. The bootstrap image on the tape was probably more restrictive
than that; if one of the licensees needed something different to
get started we would have tried to make it, but I don't remember
whether that ever happened.
Later systems (loosely corresponding to the Ninth and Tenth editions
of the manual) ran on a somewhat wider set of VAXes, in particular
the MicroVAX II and III and the VAX 8700 and 8550 (but not the dual-
processor 8800). There was never a real distribution of either of
those systems, though a few sites made special requests and got
hand-crafted snapshots under the same restrictive letter agreement.
So far as I know, no Research UNIX system after 7/e has ever been made
available under anything but a special letter agreement. There was
at one point some discussion amongst several interested parties
(including me and The Esteemed Warren Toomey) about strategies to
open up the later source code, but that was quashed by the IBM vs
The SCO Group lawsuit. It would likely be very hard to make happen
now, because I doubt there's anyone left inside Bell Labs with both
the influence and the interest, though I'd be quite happy to be
proven wrong on that.
I know of one place in the world where (a descendant of) that
system is still running, but I am not at the moment in a position
to say where that is. I do know, however, of at least two places
where there are safe copies of the source code, so it is unlikely
to disappear from the historic record even if that record cannot
be made open for a long time.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
(Computing Science Research Centre, Bell Labs, 1984-1990)
There was a posting on the SIMH list today from Joerg Hoppe
<j_hoppe(a)t-online.de> about a project to build a microfiche scanner
that has now successfully converted 53,545 document pages to
electronic form, and the files are being uploaded to the PDP-11
section of bitsavers.org. The scanner is described here:
http://retrocmp.com/projects/scanning-micro-fiches
There are links on that page to the rest of the story. It is an
amazing piece of work for a single person.
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