It’s not mine, rather it’s Asianometry‘s. It’s a nice overview of the rise of Unix. I’d recommend checking it out, it’s pretty good. And of course, as I’m referenced!
Years ago I had tried to make these old OS’s accessible to the masses with a simple windows installer where you could click & run these ancient artifacts. Say 4.2BSD.
Installing should be pretty straight forward, I just put the license as a click through and accept defaults.
Starting BSD via ‘RUN BSD42’ and the emulator will fire up, and being up a console program (Tera Term) giving you the console access. Windows will probably warn you that it requested network access. This will allow you to access the VAX over the network, including being able to telnet into the VAX via ‘Attach a PTY’ which will spawn another Tera Term, prompting you to login.
telnettting into the VAX
You can login as root, there is no password, and now you are up and running your virtual VAX with 4.2BSD!
All the items
I converted many of the old documents into PDF’s so you may want to start with the Beginners guide to Unix. I thought this was a great way to bring a complex system to the masses, but I’m not sure if I succeded.
776 downloads
As it sits now, since 2007 it’s had 776 downloads. I’d never really gotten any feedback so I’d hoped it got at least a few people launched into the bewildering world of ancient Unix. Of course I tried to make many more packages but I’d been unsure if any of them went anywhere. It’s why I found these videos so interesting as at least the image artifacts got used for something!
But in the off hand, maybe this can encourage some Unix curious into a larger world.
It’s been… a trying year, and unfortunately the nonsensical stuff I had planned to do this year fell through. Sadly all I have is this half baked idea, so I’m sorry but I guess it’s better than nothing?
OS X 10.4.1 / Maklar, a lump of coal
While talking about Mach/XNU and of course how obvious with how ‘easy’ it was to build Darwin 0.3 for i386, I had noticed that the original Marklar 10.4.1 deadmoo image had all up and disappeared from the internet. Obviously, that had to be fixed, and I was able to locate a copy, and upload it to archive.org! (merry christmas?!)
Digging around further lead me to this post on macrumors.com, detailing the hardware that Apple used for the Apple Development Transition Kit, and how it was an Intel D915 Pentium 4 board. Neat! So digging around some more and I find this:
Mark Hoekstra’s setup
An entire setup guide by Mark Hoekstra! (RIP). The big takaway here is that if you want the accelerated graphics for the best Marklar experience you need an Intel board with the 915 chipset. Combing through theretroweb.com, you can find quite a few boards that used this chipset. I didn’t want to spend a lot of pateron money on this, so I thought I could do it on the cheap. I picked up a Dell 4700 motherboard, and some ‘as is’ 915 boards for their CPU’s and RAM.
I really need to get some SATA cables, I had to pull one out of my AMD64 machine to get this thing going. Which leads to the other issue how to boot this thing?!
blurry netboot.xyz
I won’t touch much onto it as I couldn’t get any custom menus working at all so the usefulness is super limited, but I setup netboot.xyz at home, was able to netboot the board, and dd a deadmoo onto the SATA disk I pulled from the G5 iMac.
Fan pinout for some DellsDell 40pin power/IO pinout
On many of these Dell boards there is only one fan jack, so I just made a simple breakout so I could drive some fans & a AIO liquid cooler. Although the dell boards suck when it comes to easy heatsink mounting.
Dell board with fan breakout & something heavy to hold the water block in place
It wasn’t pretty but it did work.
booting up
So yeah it booted up into OS X! It’s super fast. One thing that was always interesting is that running 10.4.1 under VMware or Qemu is that there is a lot of blitting ‘bugs’ that artifacts like crazy. And it does it on real hardware. It was pretty neat to see. Unfortunately there was a long term issus with the board that I didn’t really pay attention to the USB ports.
over-current condition
Even OS X noticed the USB problem
USB in an overcurrent condition.
Since I was using PS/2 peripherals I thought I could just ignore it.
GMA-900
In order for the accelerated video to work you need the Intel 915 chipset with GMA-900 support.
Silicon Image ADD2 card
I do have the PCI-E adapter, the ADD2 card that is apparently needed, but I was copying over some video files and the board suddenly powered off, never to power up again.
Dead boards
So in the end, I just had an hour or so running 10.4.1, and now I have 3 processors, about 4GB of RAM, and a box of dead boards. I did get lucky that the 22 GoodBoyPoints (GBP) did refund me the price of the board. So maybe I’ll tackle it again next year.
BOW the gift that keeps on giving
In BOW news, the excellent Win16 emulator WineVDM had enough updates where BOW starts to run. And yes my hammering of Apache does in fact run! I can’t imagine what to really put on a page to make it interesting, but behold bow.superglobalmegacorp.com.
Not sure what to say, BOW on WineVDM on Windows 10
I was going to try to do some DOSBox using Trumpet PPP to a Linux VM to give it internet access this way, but WineVDM is far easier to get working. YAY.
That about wraps it up
Sorry if you were expecting anything cohesive or making sense, but sadly it hasn’t. I’m not sure if pursuing the Marklar thing is worth it, although it was cool.
On the heels of discovering BOW, I thought I’d try to make a cross compiler. Attempts at running binaries on *BSD systems had mixed results, although I thought it was interesting that my old Linux a.out cross compiler can generate object files BOW can happily link, although anything more complicated resulted in disaster. As part of that project I had build a 386BSD 0.1 cross so I figured that’d be worth a shot.
And it worked!
Sor for the two or three people who care here we go!
I’ve broken this up into each of GCC’s phases (programs) so that I can inspect the output of each as I go. This also lets me control exactly what gets passed where. And in this case forces the use of the 80387 where/when needed. It’s also nice to see where and what gets pulled in by the C pre-processor what magical numbers are set, and of course to see how the calling conventions work in the resulting assembler file. While I had built this around the idea of cross compiling the 386BSD 0.1 kernel, it’s still fascinating to me that it can be hammered into making BOW compatible executables. Although I didn’t update the CPP flags, no doubt I probably should as the headers probably expect something more FreeBSD.
Running make yields:
C:\bow\src\hello>make
cpp -I../../include -v -undef -D__GNUC__ -Dunix -Di386 -D__unix__ -D__i386__ -D__386BSD__ hi.c hi.i
GNU CPP version 1.39
cc1 hi.i -quiet -O -m80387 -version -o hi.S
GNU C version 1.39 (80386, BSD syntax) compiled by GNU C version 7.1.0.
default target switches: -m80387
a386 hi.S -o hi.obj
ld -o hi ../../lib/crt0.o hi.obj -L..\..\lib -lc -lgnulib -lm
C:\bow\src\hello>size hi
text data bss dec hex
24576 4096 0 28672 7000
C:\bow\src\hello>wsl file hi
hi: a.out little-endian 32-bit demand paged pure executable not stripped
C:\bow\src\hello>
It should also probably be worth mentioning that the linage of BOW has to be in the dark days of the AT&T v CSRG/BSDi lawsuit as this toolchain does produce binaries that run, unlike the 1.0 phase of both NetBSD/FreeBSD where they dumped all the prior code and forked harder from the common 386BSD 0.1 that we all loved.
fib
Simple Fibonacci sequence
Inform ’87 interpreter
My favorite ZIP interpreter
NS32016 emulator
Now this one is interesting it’s a NS32016 emulator! I left the ns32016 cross in the data directory if you want to generate the data file. I was surprised it worked, but wow!
phoon
Phases of the moon may not seem all that exciting at first, but the big thing is the handling of the math coprocessor, and of course to be sure to link against the BOW libm. Otherwise it just hangs the system.
trek
And of course the old TREK game from Unix lore.
I would imagine that a newer version of GCC or at least CC1 should be easy enough to build, and of course cross compiling gives you an out of the 16MB RAM limit that WINMEM32 imposes.
The biggest WTF I had was for Hack 1.03. I’m not sure why it didn’t want to link, but rest assured, the cross compiled objects just linked fine. I don’t know.
In other BOW news I have been in contact with the author, I don’t want to bother him too much but I’ll try to glean a lot more info from him.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood,
and I ---
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
"The Road Not Taken" [1916] -- Robert Frost
I didn’t want to make my last post exclusively focusing on 386BSD 0.0, but I thought the least I could do to honor Bill’s passing was to re-install 0.0 in 2022. As I mentioned his liberating Net/2 and giving it away for free for lowly 386/486 based users ushered in a massive shift in computer software where so called minicomputer software was now available for micro computer users. Granted 32bit micro computers, even in 1992 were very expensive, but they were not out of the reach of mere mortals. No longer did you have to share a VAX, you could run Emacs all by yourself! As with every great leap, the 0.0 is a bit rough around the edges, but with a bit of work it can be brought up to a running state, even in 2022.
But talking with my muse about legacies, and the impact of this release I thought I should at least go thru the motions, and re-do an installation, a documented one at that!
Stealing fire from the gods:
Although I had done this years ago, I was insanely light on details. From what I remember I did this on VMware, and I think it was fusion on OS X, then switching over to Bochs. To be fair it was over 11 years ago.
Anyways I’m going to use the VMware player (because I’m cheap), and just create a simple VM for MS-DOS that has 16MB of RAM, and a 100MB disk. Also because of weird issues I added 2 floppy drives, and a serial & parallel port opened up to named pipe servers so I can move data in & out during the install. This was really needed as the installation guide is ON the floppy, and not provided externally.
VMware disk geometry
One of the things about 386BSD 0.0 is that it’s more VAX than PC OS, so it doesn’t use partition tables. This also means geometry matters. So hitting F2 when the VM tries to boot, I found that VMware has given me the interesting geometry of 207 cylinders, 16 heads, and a density of 63 sectors/track. If you multiply 207*16*63 you get 208656 usable sectors, which will be important. Multiply that by 512 for bytes per sector you get a capacity of 106,831,872. Isn’t formatting disks like it’s the 1970s fun? Obviously if you attempt to follow along, obviously yours could be different.
Booting off install diskette
Throwing the install disk in the VM will boot it up to the prompt very quickly. So that’s nice. The bootloader is either not interactive at all, or modern machines are so fast, any timeout mechanism just doesn’t work.
As we are unceremonially dumped to a root prompt, it’s time to start the install! From the guide we first remount the floppy drive as read-write with the following:
mount -u /dev/fd0a /
Now for the fun part, we need to create an entry in the /etc/disktab to describe our disk, so we can label it. You can either type all this in, use the serial port, or just edit the Conner 3100 disk and turn it into this:
As you can see the big changes are the ‘dt’ or disk type line nt,ns and nc, which describe heads, density and cylinders. And how 16,63,207 came from the disk geometry from above. The ‘pa’,’pb’… entries describe partitions, and since they are at the start of the disk, nothing changes there since partitions are described in sectors. Partition C refrences the entire disk, so it’s set to the calculated 208656 sectors. Partition A+B is 24288, so 208,656-24,288 is 184,368 which then gives us the size of partition H. I can’t imagine what a stumbling block this would have been in 1992, as you really have to know your disks geometry. And of course you cannot share your disk with anything else, just like the VAX BSD installs.
With the disklabel defined, it’s now time to write it to the disk:
disklabel -r -w wd0 vmware100
And as suggested you should read it back to make sure it’s correct:
disklabel -r wd0
wd0 labeled as a custom VMware 100
Now we can format the partitions, and get ready to transfer the floppy disk to the hard disk. Basically it boils down to this:
Oddly enough the restore set also has files for the root, *however* it’s not complete, so you need to make sure to get files from the floppy, and again from the restore set.
One of the annoying things about this install is that VMware crashes trying to boot from the hard disk, so this is why we added 2 floppy drives to the install so we can transfer the install to the disk. Also it appears that there is some bug, or some other weird thing as the restore program wants to put everything into the ‘bin’ directory just adding all kinds of confusion, along with it not picking up end of volume correctly. So we have to do some creative work arounds.
So we mount the ‘h’ partition next as it’s the largest one and will have enough scratch space for our use:
mkdir /mnt/bin
mount /dev/wd0a /mnt/bin
mount /dev/wd0h /mnt/bin/usr
cd /mnt/bin/usr
Now is when we insert the 1st binary disk into the second floppy drive, and we are going to dump into a file called binset:
cat /dev/fd1 > binset
Once it’s done, you can insert the second disk, and now we are going to append the second disk to binset:
cat /dev/fd1 >> binset
You need to do this with disks 2-6.
I ran the ‘sync’ command a few times to make sure that binset is fully written out to the hard disk. Now we are going to use the temperamental ‘mr’ program to extract the binary install:
cd /mnt
mr 1440 /mnt/bin/usr/binset | tar -zxvf -
This will only take a few seconds, but I’d imagine even on a 486 with an IDE disk back then, this would take forever.
The system is now extracted! I just ran the following ‘house cleaning’ to make sure everything is fine:
Now for actually booting up and using this, as I mentioned above, VMware will crash attempting to boot 386BSD. Maybe it’s the bootloader? Maybe it’s BIOS? I don’t know. However old versions of Qemu (I tested 0.9 & 0.10.5) will work.
With the system booted you should run the following to mount up all the disks:
fsck -p mount -a update /etc/netstart
I just put this in a file called /start so I don’t have to type all that much over and over and over:
Booting from Hard Disk, under Qemu
On first boot there seems to be a lot of missing and broken stuff. The ‘which’ command doesn’t work, and I noticed all the accounting stuff is missing as well:
The source code is extracted in a similar fashion, it expects everything to be under a ‘src’ directory, so pretty much the same thing as the binary extract, just change ‘bin’ to ‘src’, and it’s pretty much done.
End thoughts
I think this wraps up the goal of getting this installed and booting. I didn’t want to update or change as little as possible to have that authentic 1992 experience, limitations and all. It’s not a perfect BSD distribution, but this had the impact of being not only free, but being available to the common person, no SPARC/MIPS workstations, or other obscure or specialized 68000 based machine, just the massively copied and commodity AT386. For a while when Linux was considered immature, BSD’s led the networking charge, and I don’t doubt that many got to that position because of that initial push made by Bill & Lynne with 386BSD.
Compressed with 7zip, along with my altered boot floppy with my VMware disk entry it’s 8.5MB compressed. Talk about tiny! For anyone interested here is my boot floppy and vmdk, which I run on early Qemu.
As mentioned on the TUHS mailing list. Many will remember his work on being a literal Prometheus, thrashing his work in the cathedral and delivering Net/2 to the lower i386 users. He and his wife, Lynne were instrumental in kicking off the surviving legacy of University research Unix.
I don’t need to bemoan on opertunities lost, the pivotal moments of 1991 or the way the Internet arranged itself around the needs of being PC i386, portability, and then a schism later security.
Details are sparse overall, I believe he is survived by his wife and a daughter?
I didn’t realize that I never uploaded this over there. After a discussion on the passing anniversary on the TUHS mailing list I had to dig out my installed copy.
I had forgotten just how rough around the edges this was, as it’s missing quite a few utilities from the Net/2 tape, and isn’t complete enough to come up in multiuser mode, but it is capable of booting up.
Although 386BSD itself was really short lived with its effective short death in the subsequent release it paved the way for an internet only release of a BSD Unix by just 2 people. And it closed up the glaring hole of the lack of a free i386 port of Net/2.
The natural competition was Mach386, which was based around the older 4.3BSD Tahoe, and the up and coming BSDI, which had many former CSRG people which were also racing to deliver their own i386 binary / source release for sale.
One thing about this era is that you had SUN apparently forced out of the BSD business instead to work with the USL on making SYSV usable, leaving NeXT as the next big seller of BSD. The commercial world was going SYSV in a big way, and the only place that was to have a market was on the micros. And for those of us who wanted something open and free 386BSD paved the way realizing the dream of the Net/2 release. A free Unix for the common person, the true democratization of computing by letting common people use, develop and distribute it independently of any larger organization.
It’s almost a shame that GNU had stuck with the unrealized dream of a hierarchy of daemons, instead of adopting the BSD kernel with a GNU userland, on top of that tendy micro kernel Mach.
The landscape radically changed with the infamous ad proudly proclaiming “It’s UNIX”.
While USL was happy to fight both BSDI and the CSRG they never persued Bill Jolitz. And after the internet flame and lawsuit dragged on, neither of the splinter groups NetBSD or FreeBSD caught up, although both did reset upon the release of the 4.4BSD Lite 2 code.
Sure I can cross compile Linux, but what about 386BSD? This had long been a thorn in my side, as the GCC/Binutil toolchain that is used in this early era is not GNU pure, they had been modified in all kinds of ways. One of which was a builtin memcpy that doesn’t work the same as a normal memcpy, and the other being that the C compiler & pre-processor rely in YACC to build the tokens. I had been using bison before, however even though bison didn’t generate any errors it build the compiler wrong enough that the majority of the kernel wouldn’t compile.
As it stands right now, the only things that do not compile is locore
to post process the kernel, symorder is used along with dbsym, although neither do any processing to the kernel file itself, so they aren’t needed to get a working system.
386BSD Release 0.1 by William and Lynne Jolitz.
Copyright (c) 1989,1990,1991,1992 William F. Jolitz. All rights reserved.
Based in part on work by the 386BSD User Community and the
BSD Networking Software, Release 2 by UCB EECS Department.
386BSD 0.1.2018 (GENERICISA) 02/02/18 15:01
Other than that, yeah it’s great, compile a kernel in under 15 seconds.
Anyone that cares, the initial release is here:Â 386bsd01.7z
I just got an email that the ‘officially sanctioned’ patches to Net/2 are still located here. Just about every 386BSD 0.0 mirror that survives is missing these files. So I made a copy of them on mine, here.
This dates the patches to February 26th 1992, and all the 3 1/2″ binaries being the 4th of March 1992. And for more confusion the 5 1/4″ floppies date to the 17th of March. The 40kb worth of user patches ended around June of 1992.
I thought I’d go ahead and see if I could get Net/2 to build on my own.
Net/2
Well it compiles, and tries to boot…. Sadly there is no adb or gdb support. How on earth did people debug this stuff then? I’m not sure where the crash location is, or what to do about it. But I thought this was really cool.
I’ve also tried to track down 4.4BSD encumbered, which was released around the same time as the 4.4BSD-Lite1 which was after the AT&T vs BSDi/CSRG thing.. Or even the release that parallels the Net/2 release…
I was thinking after rebuilding the Mach disk, that back in the say it was insinuated that the changes from Net/2 to 386BSD 0.0 were quite minimal. So I figured I should take a look. The first thing to do would be to clean up Net/2’s kernel to look more like 386 BSD’s. This was trivial as there wasn’t much of anything structure wise done. Running the patch was pretty easy:
Make it sound like Bill spent six months on six files.
I guess the real question is can I find a so called encumbered 4.4 BSD, and compare that to the lite to see the magical “six files” and then check the drift into Net/2, to 386BSD 0.0 …
