So today on slashdot I saw this:
“In this its 40th year of operating system life, some Unix stalwarts are trying to resurrect its past. That is, they are taking on the unenviable and difficult job of restoring to their former glory old Unix software artifacts such as early Unix kernels, compilers and other important historical source code pieces. In a paper to be presented at next week’s Usenix show, Warren Toomey of the Bond School of IT is expected to detail restoration work being done on four key Unix software artifacts all from the early 1970s — Nsys, 1st edition Unix kernel, 1st and 2nd edition binaries and early C compilers. In his paper, Toomey states that while the history of Unix has been well-documented, there was a time when the actual artifacts of early Unix development were in danger of being lost forever.”
It’s always cool when this stuff gets some attention. I just wish someone who would write this stuff, would show people HOW to run it… It’s not that hard is it???
Where would I find an emulator for the ancient hardware this would run on?
SIMH is the best emulator for ancient hardware.
Start here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/simh
I maintain the builds, and the MS-DOS version (think lowest common denominator!) includes a bunch of examples on using SIMH for various CPU's & Operating Systems.
For ancient UNIX I've been bundling various versions on the page http://sourceforge.net/projects/bsd42
There is even a 'ready to run' version of Unix v1 on there.