Tim Newsham:
Does anyone know if emulators are capable of running 8th ed
unix or later? What about emulation of the bitblit?
========
Who knows what blitjerq lurks in the hearts of men?
Seriously, an emulator with appropriate CPU settings should
be able to run latter-day Research UNIX without much trouble.
8/e would need a VAX-11/780 or 750; 10/e would work on a
VAX 8550 or 8700 (only one CPU, though) or a MicroVAX II
or III. I forget just when the MicroVAX work was first
done (by Ted Kowalski, who in an earlier day wrote fsck),
so I'm not sure at what point in the 9/e era it appeared;
but since 8/e was the last really organized tape we made,
it doesn't really matter.
As others have pointed out, the blit/jerq code didn't
run on the VAX, but in a separate terminal. For that
you'd need an emulator for the MC68000 or the WE32100.
By the time the 8/e tape was cut, the 68K-based Blits
had pretty much been retired; I'm not sure that code
would be as interesting to resurrect as that for the
WE32100-based Teletype 5620 DMD. Of course you'd
also have to emulate all the I/O devices, including
the decidedly-non-PS/2 keyboard and mouse.
I don't remember for sure any more (maybe Dennis does),
but the jerq code may have been on a separate tape
because the special C compiler for that CPU chip wasn't
easily redistributed--it came from the commercial side
of AT&T, not the research part.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
_______________________________________________
TUHS mailing list
TUHS(a)minnie.tuhs.org
https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs