WYSE Unix Virtualized

(this is a guest post from Tenox)

wyseunix

WYSE Unix Virtualization Challenge has been officially won by Mihai Gaitos of hawk.ro. He received $100 prize via PayPal. Congratulations!

WYSE Unix has now been virtualized and can run in Qemu via Curses mode, or modified Bochs due to character map issues and vanilla VirtualBox!

wyse_on_bochswyse_on_vboxMihai has posted some gory details of the installation challenges on his website.

Ready to run image with modified Bochs binary for Linux is available here.
VirtualBox OVA file available here.

For hard core fanatics, the system comes with SLIP/slattach so you should be able to network it much like Dell Unix.

Special thanks to:
Andrew Gong for finding a tape image on eBay
Al Kossow of bitsavers.org for recovering the tape image
Michal Necasek for patching up the original floppy disk image

12 thoughts on “WYSE Unix Virtualized

  1. Great site, great project, great work. Thanks to everyone involved in making this sort of preservation happen. I just loaded it up in virtual box, and used vi + cc to make a hello world. There are so many great resources on this site. I love it.

    I had some wyse serial terminals I saved form the trash for years with asciiquarium, aclock, etc. Gave them away, otherwise I would interface it with an instance of this for a screen shot.

  2. Hi!

    Tried in VirtualBOX with slip on *nix host, if anyone is interested, I can mail her the scripts. The result was success, the usual slip configuration WoW required from guest side. We had to guess the serial ports’ dev entry, the slattach, the ifconfig tweaks, manpages helped a lot.

      • Or, perhaps I don’t need to!

        UNIX System V/386 Release 3.2.1A
        wyse
        Copyright (C) 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988 AT&T
        Copyright (C) 1987, 1988 Microsoft Corp.
        Copyright (C) 1988, 1989, 1990 Wyse Technology Inc.
        All Rights Reserved
        Login last used: Mon Sep 21 20:32:21 2015

        / : Disk space: 11.07 MB of 21.65 MB available (51.14%).
        /usr : Disk space: 7.46 MB of 32.97 MB available (22.63%).
        /usr2 : Disk space: 31.45 MB of 32.48 MB available (96.83%).

        Total Disk Space: 49.99 MB of 87.11 MB available (57.38%).

        TERM=./
        $ ./cky190
        ./cky190: not found
        $ ./cku190
        C-Kermit 5A(190), 4 Oct 94, for Xenix/386
        Copyright (C) 1985, 1994,
        Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York.
        Type ? or HELP for help.
        C-Kermit>

        Only took >5 hours to paste the uuencoded binary (4.3BSD’s `uudecode` builds fine!) via the curses console.

    • Better late than never.

      Try using socat, of which a named pipe could be connected with custom bi-di files when starting a virtualbox VM. After starting vm, “socat” it to a pty, and then slattach the created pseudo tty (pty). Some iptables voodoo magic might be needed.
      Basically it is the same as slip setup for qemu/dosbox (except socat-ing the fifo created by virtualbox), you can visit and try slip-ping with official dosbox here:

      http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Slip_configuration_on_linux_host

  3. Has anyone worked out running under Virtualbox 7 how to:
    print using the host?
    access the internet?
    scroll the screen back?

    and where the source tree is?

    Thanks
    Ken

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