18 Feb
2025
18 Feb
'25
4:36 p.m.
From: Angelo Papenhoff
So the next step would be to restore the assembly
source? :)
It would be a fun project restoring the source code (there's a warm and a cold
kernel, so they can be diffed to work out the ifdefs). In fact, I did disassemble vcboot
and bos, as well as half the warm UNIX kernel, but in my infinite wisdom, I decided to
name the IDA databases f1/f2/f3 and accidentally deleted them while cleaning up my desktop
:((.
From: Noel Chiappa
It will be interesting to see what it reveals, as
it's in the UNIX 'dark age'
between V1 and V4. Working from hints and clues in the extant 'UNIX
Programmer's Manual: Second Edition', I had tried to figure out how V2
differed from V1:
I have some UNIX V2, V3 and V4 binaries (no kernels) recovered from DMR's DECtapes,
plus a kernel driver or two from slightly earlier than nsys. Also, I have a few V4
distribution documents. I'm still slowly recovering stuff from those tapes, but most
of what I've recovered is here
(https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Applications/Dennis_Tapes/Gao_Analysis/) (thank you Warren
for hosting them!) if they interest you.
I was mostly just trying to work out how the
mysterious KS11
worked.
Sadly, this kernel does not have the KS11 stuff. The last1120c tape has binaries from a
(or the, since there was only one?) machine with the KS11, as well as an earlier C
compiler still called "nc". Of course, they're effectively V3+ binaries
that use the EAE, so they won't really help with knowing how the KS11 worked.
It would be very interesting to know what fails. By
'hang', do you mean
'ceases making progress', or 'halts'?
Don't quote me on this, but I think under E11, it hangs in a loop before getting to
init(7), and under SIMH, it bus errors while running init(7). Though I'll need to
double-check SIMH because I may have used unix-jun72's /etc/init instead of the one
from s2.
Sincerely,
Yufeng