http://plover.net/~agarvin/parse-disktab.py

I’d hate to figure those out by hand. In fact, the netbsd people made a mistake in their install guide, which was replicated in the gunkies post.

Output, for instance:
=== DEC RA82 Winchester ===
Numeric disk type? [0] 2
Disk name? [] ra82
badsectoring [n]
removable? [n]
Interleave? [0] 1
rpm? [0] 3600
trackskew? [0]
cylinderskew? [0]
headswitch? [0]
track-to-track? [0]
drivedata 0? [0]
drivedata 1? [0]
drivedata 2? [0]
drivedata 3? [0]
drivedata 4? [0]

bytes/sector? [0] 512
sectors/track? [0] 57
tracks/cylinder? [0] 15
sectors/cylinder? [0] 855
cylinders? [0] 1423
META INFO:
total blocks: 1216665
size in KB: 608332
size in kibibytes: 622932

Here’s also a trivial mkdisttap replacement:

http://plover.net/~agarvin/mk-dist-tape.py
Usage:

$ ./mk-dist-tape.py -o netbsd-132.tape tk50-file1-132:512 tk50-file2-132:512 base.tar etc.tar man.tar games.tar comp.tar misc.tar text.tar

Here’s my first guide, which is mostly based on yours with some additional stuff: http://plover.net/~agarvin/4.3bsd-on-simh.html

I’ll add netbsd and ultrix ones later. I administered Ultrix in the early 90s, and really liked it at the time.

It’s fun to revisit these things on virtual hardware. In the mid to late 90s, I managed to accumulate a collection of more than 50 old Unix boxes, but when I moved to a smaller apartment, had to get rid of them. Really wish I had found storage instead. I had boxes and boxes of QICs of a lot of legacy OS installs and software, probably mostly lost now.