Well this came as a bit of a surprise, but also a great thing!

 I compiled 4.4BSD to get pmax and sparc binary, from CSRG Archive CD-ROM #4
source code.

    http://www.netside.co.jp/~mochid/comp/bsd44-build/

  pmax:
    - Works on GXemul DECstaion(PMAX) emulation.
    - I used binutils 2.6 and gcc 2.7.2.3 taken from Gnu ftp site,
      as 4.4BSD src does not contain pmax support part in as, ld,
      gcc and gdb.
    - Lack of GDB. I got rid of compile errors of gdb 4.16, but that
      does not work yet.
    - gcc included can not deal c++ static constructor. So, contrib/groff
      can not be compiled. Instead, it uses old/{nroff,troff,eqn,tbl..}.

  sparc:
    - Works on sun4c. I use on SPARCstation 2, real hardware.
      TME sun4c emulation can boot to single user, but it locks up in
      middle of /etc/rc.
 
 CSRG Archive CD-ROM #4's source code (just after Lite2 release) seems
have differences from CSRG's binary distributions before (2 times),
e.g. mount systemcall is not compatible.

 I used NetBSD 1.0/sparc, NetBSD 1.1/pmax for 1st (slightly) cross
compiling. NetBSD 1.0/sparc boots and works well on TME emulator.
SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris7 works too, but this 4.4BSD binary doesn't..

-mochid

So this is a heck yes, let me boot this thing up! It’s been a while since I last messed with GXemul, but even this old version runs 4.4BSD!

And yeah it’ll boot up! Exciting.

As mentioned it’s based off the CD #4 from the CSRG set. Really if you are interested in old UNIX, be it BSD or AT&T get this set!

On the back you can see it’s the last source dump including all the SCCS tags. This plus the extra “historic content” is what you need! Maybe it’s the emulation, maybe it’s the last cut of 4.4 but mounting a CD-ROM just works. So nice. Although the source on the CD isn’t directly buildable. There is some issue with the MIPS locore which needs a patch from mochid, but with the fixes in place it’ll build and run!

Obviously the unanswered question is where is the i386. And that is probably the greatest 90’s software bungle that is either conspiracy to profit or just incredible lack of vision when it comes to platforms. It’s certainly easy to have an off version of reality in University, especially with nice OEM hardware grants to see the world in one light, Just as the Amiga/Atari home computer wars both ignored the vastly inferior PC for it’s laughable beeper, CP/M like OS and woefully inadequate CGA graphics. But the PC was modular and it was an open platform, the industry didn’t have to wait for IBM to make a 32bit PC, instead you had people adding 386DX processors on 286 motherboards complete with 80287 coprocessors, and custom memory controllers to retrofit the memory bus.

CSRG had TAHOE dreams, HP 680000 plans, then SPARC. All the while missing out on the unwashed masses with their 386 and 486 machines. I haven’t tried it, but I bet BSD/OS 1.1 will patch in pretty well for i386. And why would it? Because that was the ticket to the pre pre pre .com bubble of commodity minicomputer UNIX on the desktop. But that blasted 1-800-ITS-UNIX ruined it all, and this ‘hey guys’ project took the UNIX crown.

I’ve been playing with updating the GXemul ‘port’ I did along with integrating SLIRP so I can telnet it. The timing is very shakey and I’m not too happy with it. And I want to redo the disks and sources to be a cleaner ‘merge’ so it just ‘makes’ in the normal places like a native build. If I had crazy people money I’d want to port this to the Loongson-3A4000, but that’d be crazy, instead it’d be more worth my while to try to make an Amiga or Atari ST.

But what do I know, my cellphone runs Mach/BSD!