The Rise of Unix. The Seeds of its Fall. / A Chronicle of the Unix Wars

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!

The Rise of Unix. The Seeds of its Fall.

And part 2: A Chronicle of the Unix Wars

A Chronicle of the Unix Wars (youtube.com)

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.

Download BSD4.2-install-0.3.exe (Ancient UNIX/BSD emulation on Windows) (sourceforge.net)

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.

Other downloads in the same scope are:

Enjoy!

86 DOS Version 0.11 found!

86-DOS on archive.org

As of this moment, this is the oldest version of 86-DOS surviving in the wild. The prior version was 0.34. You can download a disk image over on archive.org. Thanks to F15sim for providing the uploads!

Getting this running was a little involved as I first had to build open-simh, I just used the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to build the altairz80 emulator. With the emulator built, you’ll need the BIOS 86mon.bin from schorn.ch as 86dos.zip. In the archive you’ll find 86-DOS 1.0 in the zip file. Simply editing the file 86dos and specifying the 0.11 download (I renamed it as it’s too long and too many spaces!) and you’ll be able to run 86-DOS.

86-DOS booting up on open-simh

There isn’t much on the diskette:

  • COMMAND COM
  • RDCPM COM
  • HEX2BIN COM
  • ASM COM
  • TRANS COM
  • SYS COM
  • EDLIN COM
  • CHESS COM
  • CHESS DOC

There is a simple chess game, although I’m not much of a player..

A:chess

Choose your color (W/B): W
Ply depth (1-6): 1
E2-E4
e7 e5

There is no source code in this disk image, but there is some stuff on the 0.34 image.

Just a quick post in that middle of the night.

2,000 monthly downloads!

Well this is a bit ambiguous. As Im waking up to check emails I get this notice:

Congratulations! Ancient UNIX/BSD emulation on Windows has just been recognized with the following awards by SourceForge:

Community Choice
SourceForge Favorite

These honors are awarded only to select projects that have reached significant milestones in terms of downloads and user engagement from the SourceForge community.

This is a big achievement, as your project has qualified for these awards out of over 500,000 open source projects on SourceForge. SourceForge sees nearly 30 million users per month looking for, and developing, open source software. These award badges will now appear on your project page, and the award assets can be found in your project admin section.

-sourceforge email

So yeah, and here we are:

Nothing like standing on the backs of giants!

Naturally ready to run favorites include:

And of course for the DIY enthusiasts:

Honorable mention goes to the 4.3BSD UWISC enthusiast that downloaded Apache, AberMUD, and lynx!.

Playing Mel Kaye’s LPG-30 Black Jack

Oh sure, the tale is as old as time itself, but how does one play the original Royal McBee LPG-30 game?

Something very Fallout’esque about this modern miracle of miniaturization!

Thankfully it’s all covered here: Using the SIMH LGP-30 emulator | Obsolescence Guaranteed

For the impatient the short story is this on a SIMH LGP prompt:

SET CPU LGP30
SET CPU TAPE
LOAD BKJCK.TX
SET CPU MANUAL
G -T 4500
g

Naturally you’ll need the game as well which is currently on FTP at ftp.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de . Obviously thanks to our google overlords FTP is no longer integrated in the browser because the browser is only http, not gopher, telnet, ftp .. who needs to be universal?

You’ll find it in the /pub/cm/lgp30/papertapes/Games directory.

Important things is that your yes/no should be inputted as y’ or n’ The game will stop SIMH so you need to ‘g’ to start again.

FUN!

Although this comes up time and time again, I found this hacker news post, that actually has a picture of Mel, showing that he was in fact a real person.

The Gould SEL Concept 32/87

Despite Gould’s location being a few minutes drive from where I first arrived in America, I never had any idea they existed, were making their own exciting machines, or were even a Unix VAR. At a time during the Unix wars one was left to choose SYSV or BSD, but Gould had gone another direction with UTX with a ‘why not both’ approach. Truly an 80’s miracle of Unix.

Well as luck has it there is a SIMH emulator! James C. Bevier has a project on github where he’s building his SEL32 emulation on SIMH!

Even better he’s included tape images, and working INI files which I was able to make into a working system! (after some help with a tape bug)

Boot
File is COFF format
-> section (.bss) size (177960) clearing at (0xcbc18)
-> section (.text) size (724800) loading at (0x1200)
-> section (.data) size (105176) loading at (0xb2140)

Start 0x1200

UTX/32 2.1B (exp) #0: Mon Apr 10 19:46:05 GMT 1989
    bsln@fenix:/usr.POWERNODE/src/src/sys/obj

V6 CPUIPU(P) configuration (IPU not present)
top of system = 0x400000
real mem = 8388608
End of kernel map 0x218464
avail memory = 7356416
using 256 buffers containing 262144 bytes of memory
using 256 mirror buffer headers
ioi: channel iop0 at 7e00 online
ioi: channel dc0 at 800 online
ioi: channel dc1 at c00 not present, dci cc=2
ioi: channel dc2 at 400 not present, dci cc=2
ioi: channel tc0 at 1000 online
ioi: channel en0 at e00 online
 -- CHECK AND RESET THE DATE!
swapping on the b partition
dmmax 512 mbswap 3576
dumplo 11776
Checking root filesystem
Check commented out, uncomment once you have edited /etc/fstab!
Automatic reboot in progress...
Mon Aug 30 05:35:46 CDT 2021
/etc/fsck -p /dev/rdk0d
/etc/fsck -p /dev/rdk0e
/etc/fsck -p /dev/rdk0f
File systems OK

Mon Aug 30 05:36:06 CDT 2021
Mounting file systems
/dev/dk0d mounted on /usr.POWERNODE
/dev/dk0e mounted on /home
/dev/dk0f mounted on /usr/local
Initializing loopback
Starting line printer daemon
Starting standard daemons: update cron.
Adding swap partitions
Standard setup functions
Invoke local rc file
Entering /etc/rc.local
dumpdirectory: No such file or directory
Starting Syslog Daemon
Starting local daemons: inetd.
Starting NFS/RPC daemons: portmap sund.
Mounting NFS filesystems
Leaving /etc/rc.local
Starting mail
Checking aliases file
Preserving editor files
Clearing /tmp - does not remove directories
Clearing pseudo terminals
Leaving rc
Mon Aug 30 05:36:07 CDT 2021


GOULD UTX/32 2.1B (noname) (console)

login:

It’s very BSD feeling on the boot and in the /usr directory there is 5bin 5lib

Sadly transferring stuff by just pasting on the console reveals that there is some IO issues in the simulator:

syncing disks... done

dumping to dev 101, offset 11776
ioi: channel dc0 at 800 online
dump succeeded

As a matter of fact doing anything too fast can/will panic the simulator. That goes for Ethernet and additional serial ports.

Interesting highlights of the platform:

Produced by hard-params version 4.1, CWI, Amsterdam
Compiler does not claim to be ANSI C

Char = 8 bits, signed
Short=16 int=32 long=32 float=32 double=64 bits
Char pointers = 32 bits
Int pointers = 32 bits

Alignments used for char=1 short=2 int=4 long=4
Character order:
    short: AB
    int:   ABCD
    long:  ABCD

Obvious issues with the platform is a lack of GCC. The PCC compiler while standard for early 80’s non PDP-11/VAX machines is a bit lacking as the years went on. I was unable to build gzip due to the following error:

# gmake
cc  -o gzip gzip.o zip.o deflate.o trees.o bits.o unzip.o inflate.o util.o crypt.o lzw.o unlzw.o unpack.o unlzh.o getopt.o
ld: warning: near subsegments too big for static base spanning
ld: gzip.o:
        no base for reloc of memref instruction at .nbtext+0x18 relative to symbol _progname
ld:
        1221 more 'no base ' errors
gmake: *** [gzip] Error 4

Sadly I don’t find much on Altavista other than this & this. It only offers this terse comment:

The constraints on address space on a Gould are quite severe.

Bummer. Additionally neither Hack 1.0/1.03 or PDP-11 Hack will build either. Surprisingly bash-1.14.7, make-3.75 and ircii-2.5 compiled. Obviously with no networking IRC is kind of pointless.

It’s an interesting time capsule of life outside of AT&T/CSRG or SUN, going in a different direction. It seems like a larger lost opportunity to take their ‘it runs both’ approach software and not have it available on different platforms. Granted for a hardware company once the software leaves the compelling reason to buy the hardware evaporates. Hello NeXT.

If anyone wants to try to re-create it, download and build the SEL32 emulator from github, and I put my vague instructions here.

Or for like minded OS tourists, you can give it a spin here: UTX32_2.1B.7z. I included a ‘9346-UTX-blank.disk’ file which is already prepared if you don’t want to go through the 15 questions to prep a disk. Likewise I made a ‘9346-UTX-biga-blank.disk’ image which is just a single large ‘a’ partition as it’s trivial to just add a bunch of big disks these days.

Full 32bit Unix machines from Ft Lauderdale! Who knew?

Confessions of a paranoid DEC Engineer: Robert Supnik talks about the great Dungeon heist!

What an incredible adventure!

Apparently this was all recorded in 2017, and just now released.

It’s very long, but I would still highly recommend watching the full thing.

Bob goes into detail about the rise of the integrated circuit versions of the PDP-11 & VAX processors, the challenges of how Digital was spiraling out of control, and how he was the one that not only championed the Alpha, but had to make the difficult decisions that if the Alpha succeeded that many people were now out of a job, and many directions had to be closed off.

He goes into great detail how the Alpha was basically out maneuvered politically and how the PC business had not only dragged them down by management not embracing the Alpha but how trying to pull a quick one on Intel led to their demise.

Also of interest was his time in research witnessing the untapped possibilities of AltaVista, and how Compaq had bogged it down, and ceded the market to the upstart Google, the inability to launch a portable MP3 player (Although to be fair the iPod wasn’t first to market by a long shot, it was the best user experience by far).

What was also interesting was his last job, working at Unisys and getting them out of the legacy mainframe hardware business and into emulation on x86, along with the lesson that if you can run your engine in primary CPU cache it’s insanely fast (in GCC land -Os is better than -O9).

The most significant part towards the end of course is where he ‘rewinds’ his story to go into his interest in simulations, and of course how he started SIMH when he had some idle time in the early 90’s. SIMH of course has done an incredible amount of work to preserve computing history of many early computers. He also touches on working with the Warren’s TUHS to get Unix v0 up and running on a simulated PDP-7 and what would have been a challenge in the day using an obscure Burroughs disk & controller modified from the PDP-9.

Yes it’s 6 hours long! But really it’s great!

Mach ’86 on the SIMH VAX

Kernel booting from 1986

While the kernel may boot on SIMH there is certainly something going on with the SIMH emulation of the hardware that threw me for a few loops. I had a pre-installed version of 4.3BSD which was on a RA81 disk but shortly after loading the kernel various binaries wouldn’t load, filesystems wouldn’t mount and of course the inevitable file corruption.

This led me to the fun of loading up 4.3 onto RP06 disks as they are smaller and I was hoping less prone to errors. During this fun, I found this page on plover.net, which as a fun filled tangent shows how to use the Quasijarus console floppy image to run the standalone programs. With the latest version of SIMH, I can run format and it initializes the disks, so I almost think it may be possible to do some kind of ‘native install’ on the VAX-11/780 SIMH, although It’s not what I was in the mood for.

So finally with an install over several RP06 disks, I was lucky enough to figure out how to build the Mach’86 kernel, and get it to boot, and then the corruption happened again. Luckily for me I had snapshotted the disks before experimenting and noticed how even those had issues booting up. It’s after a bit of searching I found that other people may have issues with SIMH’s Async I/O code, and the best thing to do, is just to disable it with a “set noasync”.

Now my disks could boot under the Mach kernel, and I could self host!

self hosted!

Setting up the build involved copying files from the ‘cs’ directory to their respective homes, along with the ‘mach/bin/m*’ commands to the /bin directory. Configuring the kernel is very much like a standard BSD kernel config, however the directory needs to exist beforehand, and instead of the in path config command run the config command in the local directory.

While maybe not perfect, keep in mind I haven’t found any real instructions as of yet, so this is more of a ‘wow it booted’ kind of thing at the moment.

While this kernel does have mentions of multi processor support I haven’t quite figured out what models (if any) are supported On the VAX, and if SIMH emulates them. While oboguev.net has a very interesting looking multiprocessor VAX emulation, VAX_MP it’s a fictional model based on the microvax, which I’m pretty sure 4.3BSD/Mach’86 is far too old for.

And for those who want to play along, here is a zip file of the disk images, emulator and config file I’m using, Mach86.zip

AT&T 3B2 400 emulated

This is super awesome!

AT&T 3B2 SYSTEM CONFIGURATION:

Memory size: 4 Megabytes
System Peripherals:

        Device Name        Subdevices           Extended Subdevices

        SBD
                        Floppy Disk
                        72 Megabyte Disk

        Welcome!
This machine has to be set up by you.  When you see the "login" message type
                                setup
followed by the RETURN key.  This will start a procedure that leads you through
those things that should be done the "first time" the machine is used.

The system is ready.

Console Login:

Back in the 1980’s AT&T shifted UNIX from being an internal research project that got somewhat popular in college spaces (and larger companies, General Motors was an early UNIX adapter, along with companies like Industrial Light and Magic).  Quickly after the divestiture of 1984, AT&T entered the commercial space with it’s own custom machines & their home made UNIX operating system.  Below is one of the ads they ran in 1984, touting their so called ‘super microcomputers’, featuring the 3B2, the 3B5, and the AT&T Personal Computer.

Thew new computers from AT&T

And indeed for many a government institute bewildered by the dozens of UNIX vendors, standards, and chaos of different platforms and processors many were all to happy to buy AT&T UNIX on AT&T machines.

And indeed this was my first experience with genuine SYSV Unix.

And I hated it.

Initially I had been thrown at an English computer lab because I knew how logon and do my work in style & diction, they decided I could help.  The system was aging and had major problems, as some prior students had figured out enough of the link kit that they would put their own attempts at re-writing portions of the kernel into the system, and it’d break.  Naturally the original installation diskettes were lost, and the best that could be done was basically shut it down throughout the day and run the disk repair utilities.  It was not a fun job.

Later on the 3B2’s were thrown into the ‘common garbage’ aka free kit for other departments, and the 3B2’s re-appeared at the next place I was volunteering at on campus.  However in addition to the two machines, there was a few other boxes of manuals, and oddly enough the installation diskettes.  And also about a dozen of these AT&T ISA Starlan adapters.  These weren’t the ones that were basically Ethernet (Starlan10) but rather the original ones.

Through some incredible luck we did find an NDIS 3 MS-DOS driver for the Starlan car, and we were able to cobble together a Starlan1 LAN consisting of a 3B2 that we cannibalized the RAM and disks from one of them to make a ‘super’ 3B2, with added TCP/IP software and a massively cut down port I did of samba to turn it into a tiny file & print server (72MB MFM disks were it’s biggest if I recall), along with Windows 95 clients.  And of course with a TCP/IP lan we could easily load a proxy server (WinGate?) on one machine with the 56kb modem, and now we all had internet access.  I know it’s sad today, but trust me back then it was “a big deal” that we had a fully functional LAN.

Over on loomcom.com there is an incredible amount of information about the reverse engineered WE32100, along with the 3B2 hardware, and of course information about the newest SIMH simulator the 3B2/400!

Instructions and disk images on the site made it incredibly easy to grab the latest SIMH Windows Development binaries, and get my own virtual 3B2 up and running in minutes! So naturally I pasted in dhrystone.c to see if it’d work.  And that was the first weird issue is that the backspace is the pound # key.  So all the C macro definitions lost their # sign.  I added them in vi without full terminal support because I’m crazy and:

# uname -a
unix unix 3.2 2 3B2
# ./dhrystone
Dhrystone(1.0) time for 500000 passes = 40
This machine benchmarks at 12500 dhrystones/second

Obviously this is 100% bogus, as the real machine should get around 735, and I didn’t even bother with the -O flag.

The current emulator doesn’t do any additional serial ports, nor any Ethernet adapters.  So you only get a console.  But with the pre-installed C compiler image, I was able to build a trivial file just fine.  Although pasting on the console really leaves a lot to be desired.

SDF AT&T 3B2/500 UNIX System

I know for some of us old people the 3B2 hid in the corners of our call centres, running our AT&T Definity switches, our voicemail, and even some of our early ISPs.  After funneling money into SUN to get them to work on SYSVr4 which was the grand unification of BSD + SYSV AT&T’s interest if UNIX quickly waned, and they divested themselves of UNIX, and eventually all PC hardware, although they did re-enter the PC space a few times before exiting yet again.

As time would tell, proprietary hardware + a previously ‘open’ operating system were not the winning combination.  And so far the only UNIX vendor to weather the Linux storm so far is IBM with it’s A/IX.

4.2BSD TCP/IP networking

I got this note from  Allen Garvin, that details his adventure in taking a stock 4.2BSD VAX image, getting it running on SIMH, and turning on the network stack.

Although 4.2 may have had security issues, (R Morris), and had some clear issues with scaling. Along with a whole host of other issues.  Naturally if you want something more ‘robust’ on modern networks, you’ll want 4.3BSD which corrected quite a number of issues.

You can read about it over on his blog.  It’s very good with step by step instructions, goes over retrieving the NIC driver, re-building the kernel, and getting it operational on our LAN.

Research UNIX v8

    v8 on SIMH

So what the heck is Research UNIX v8?  Or even what is Research UNIX?  Well a query against utzoo gave me this answer:

>I've seen people that use System V and the like refer to their Unix as
>"tenth edition" or "ninth edition", or whatever. I've always seen things as
>"System V release n", or whatever. Anyone know the difference between these
>different naming schemes ?

There are actually three designations: Versions, Editions, and
System/Releases. The proper names of the first six Unixen were
"The #th Edition". Colloquially, people called them "Version #".
The Version Sixth Edition split off several variations, one of which
became Version Seven (the Seventh Edition) and sired BSD. From
several others, System III was born, and later named System V.
Tacked onto this name were Release numbers and yes, Versions.
So you will see things line SVr3v2.

The Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Editions seldom left Bell Labs
and are also referred to as "Research UNIX". Another system
(not UNIX) they are playing with is called "Plan 9". Every so
often, a feature, such as STREAMS, finds its way into System V.

In some ways, Research UNIX is closer to BSD than to System V.

In short, UNIX began it’s life as a research project.  Until recently versions 1-6 & 32v were available to the public.  However the later versions, 8,9,10 were not.  However thanks to the work over at TUHS it’s available for non commercial use:

Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc has permitted usage saying "will not assert its
copyright rights with respect to any non-commercial copying, distribution,
performance, display or creation of derivative works of 
Research Unix®1 Editions 8,9, and 10."

So awesome!

The version of Research v8 is split onto 2 tape images, one for the graphical terminals, and the other for the OS install onto the VAX.  The distribution is not suitable for any standalone operation, and requires a previously installed 4.1BSD machine, with a second disk to install v8 onto.  Part of the installation requires you to compile your own kernel.  I ran into a bit of problems as it’s not a 100% process, but after referencing this guide from David du Colombier, I had the system up and running.  Naturally reading the installation manual helped a great deal too.

As always there is strange artifacts left in the backup, such as this scoreboard from rogue:

Top Ten Rogueists:
Rank Score Name
1 5545 Rog-O-Matic XIII for mjs: quit on level 17.
2 5043 ken: killed on level 23 by a dragon.
3 3858 zip: killed on level 16 by an invisible stalker.
4 3249 Rog-O-Matic VII: killed on level 16 by an invisible stalker.
5 2226 Rog-O-Matic VII: killed on level 13 by a troll.
6 2172 St. Jude: killed on level 13 by a troll.
7 1660 Rog-O-Matic VII: quit on level 11.
8 1632 Chipmunk the Jello: killed on level 10 by a centaur.
9 844 Rog-O-Matic VII: quit on level 5.
10 401 Rog-O-Matic VII: killed on level 4 by a snake.

Does this mean Ken Thompson was an avid rogue fan?  Perhaps.  Naturally I quickly compiled the v100 version of aclock, and had it running.

aclock on v8

I’ll have to edit this and more and more as I find out, but I’ve been busy in real life, and of course I know that in addition to v8, there is also v9 & v10 to tackle.

As always, if you want you can download my pre-installed from my site : researchv8.7z

You will have to bring your own copy of the SIMH VAX-11/780 simulator.  As of 31/3/2017 ther is issues with the github version of SIMH, and you will have issues with the disks on the VAX.  You need to disable the async with a simple set command in your ini file:

set noasync

And you should now be good to go!  As always you’ll have to battle the 404 page for the correct link and the username & password.

sorry.