From: norman@oclsc.org (Norman Wilson)
Subject: [TUHS] late research unix question
Date: Tue, 01 Dec 2009 19:30:51 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <1259713867.11400.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> (raw)
Tim Newsham:
Does anyone know if emulators are capable of running 8th ed
unix or later? What about emulation of the bitblit?
========
Who knows what blitjerq lurks in the hearts of men?
Seriously, an emulator with appropriate CPU settings should
be able to run latter-day Research UNIX without much trouble.
8/e would need a VAX-11/780 or 750; 10/e would work on a
VAX 8550 or 8700 (only one CPU, though) or a MicroVAX II
or III. I forget just when the MicroVAX work was first
done (by Ted Kowalski, who in an earlier day wrote fsck),
so I'm not sure at what point in the 9/e era it appeared;
but since 8/e was the last really organized tape we made,
it doesn't really matter.
As others have pointed out, the blit/jerq code didn't
run on the VAX, but in a separate terminal. For that
you'd need an emulator for the MC68000 or the WE32100.
By the time the 8/e tape was cut, the 68K-based Blits
had pretty much been retired; I'm not sure that code
would be as interesting to resurrect as that for the
WE32100-based Teletype 5620 DMD. Of course you'd
also have to emulate all the I/O devices, including
the decidedly-non-PS/2 keyboard and mouse.
I don't remember for sure any more (maybe Dennis does),
but the jerq code may have been on a separate tape
because the special C compiler for that CPU chip wasn't
easily redistributed--it came from the commercial side
of AT&T, not the research part.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
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next reply other threads:[~2009-12-02 0:30 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 7+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2009-12-02 0:30 Norman Wilson [this message]
2009-12-02 0:43 ` Al Kossow
2009-12-02 0:48 ` M. Warner Losh
2009-12-02 1:11 ` Brantley Coile
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2009-12-01 20:49 Tim Newsham
2009-12-01 22:06 ` Brantley Coile
2009-12-01 23:43 ` Tim Newsham
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