> From: Paul Riley

    > On my physical '03 I have twin Sykes floppy drives. I note that in the
    > LSX archives there is a Sykes driver, so I can adapt that I guess.

Yes, here:

 https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=LSX/sys/sykfd.c

It looks like it should be a straight drop-in, to run it on Mini-Unix. Not
sure if your controller is the exact same model, though? Is there any
documentation on yours? (I haven't done any searching.)

If you want to boot from it, you'll need to write a bootstrap for it; I poked
around, but didn't see one. (Not sure how they booted machines with one, back
in the day; maybe it wasn't the only drive, and they booted off something
else.)  You can probably modify the RX one:

  https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=LSX/src/rxboot.s
  https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=LSX/src/rxboot2.s

Note that this is a 2-stage bootstrap, apparently as a result of the small
hardware block size on the RX.

And of course there's still the issue of 'how to get bits onto it'. Can
floppies for it be written on some other kind of machine? If so, someone on
the Classic Computers list:

  http://www.classiccmp.org/mailman/listinfo/cctalk

may be able to help you write those, or an RL02 pack.


You should start by getting some experience building V6 OS loads (Mini-Unix
will be _very_ similar); use a simulator. I have a lengthy tutorial here:

  http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/V6Unix.html

It's in terms of Ersatz-11, which I prefer because it has that nice DOS device,
which makes it easy to get files into the Unix (so I can use my normal editor on
the host machine). However, I gather most people prefer SIMH; there is a tutorial
here:

  https://gunkies.org/wiki/Running_Unix_v6_in_SIMH

(I didn't write it; I know nothing of SIMH) for that option.

How do people using SIMH get files into a Unix running on one? Larry Allen
just wrote a PDP-11 simulator in Rust, and he's thinking about adding a
paper-tape reader (connectable to a file), so that if he installs the stock
V6 PTR driver, he can just do 'cat /dev/ptr > myfile'; sort of like how
VM/370 used the virtual card reader.

       Noel