[TUHS] PDP-7 Unix Progress

[TUHS] PDP-7 Unix Progress

[Doug McIlroy]

> Now we are hoping to  get the Living Computer Museum people to bring it up
on their real PDP-7. 

Truly a fantastic prospect! The only Unix the museum has running is
on a 3B2--a curious byway perhaps, but of little historic interest.
The PDP-7 version would be a tremendous coup.

doug

[TUHS] PDP-7 Unix Progress

[William Pechter]

Doug McIlroy wrote:
>> Now we are hoping to  get the Living Computer Museum people to bring it up
> on their real PDP-7.
>
> Truly a fantastic prospect! The only Unix the museum has running is
> on a 3B2--a curious byway perhaps, but of little historic interest.
> The PDP-7 version would be a tremendous coup.
>
> doug

Actually, they have a V7 or 2.xBSD on an 11/70 which used to be the 
Microsoft Corporate Email Server...

My kid was playing Hangman on it when we were there last year.

My idea of a perfect job would be to work in a museum like that as a 
tour guide...

Bill

-- 
Digital had it then.  Don't you wish you could buy it now!
pechter-at-gmail.com  http://xkcd.com/705/

[TUHS] PDP-7 Unix Progress

[Larry McVoy]

> Certainly the PDP-11 is an improvement, but there's something
> nostalgic about the -7 instruction set.

Umm, as a dude that assembly after the PDP-11 I just yearn for something
as pleasant as PDP-11.

[TUHS] PDP-7 Unix Progress

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Wednesday,  4 May 2016 at 12:12:40 +1000, Warren Toomey wrote:
> On Wed, May 04, 2016 at 12:44:15AM +0300, Diomidis Spinellis wrote:
>> This would have found any code from the PDP-7 Unix that appeared in the
>> First Edition.  (I was hoping that some PDP-7 instruction sequences might be
>> the same in PDP-11.)
>> Unsurprisingly, nothing came out.
>
> No, the instruction set is completely different. The PDP-11 ISA is a
> paradise compared to the spartan PDP-7 ISA.

In case you're interested, I've located a reference manual at
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/pdp7/F-75P_PDP7prelimUM_Dec64.pdf

The instruction set is very reminiscent of the PDP-8, including the
"operate" class "microcodding" instructions (starting with 7) and
autoindexing via indirect access to locations 10 to 17.  Even the
mnemonics and the assembler syntax are very similar to the -8.

Certainly the PDP-11 is an improvement, but there's something
nostalgic about the -7 instruction set.

Greg
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[TUHS] PDP-7 Unix Progress

[Warren Toomey]

On Wed, May 04, 2016 at 12:44:15AM +0300, Diomidis Spinellis wrote:
> This would have found any code from the PDP-7 Unix that appeared in the
> First Edition.  (I was hoping that some PDP-7 instruction sequences might be
> the same in PDP-11.)
> Unsurprisingly, nothing came out.

No, the instruction set is completely different. The PDP-11 ISA is a paradise
compared to the spartan PDP-7 ISA.

Cheers, Warren

[TUHS] PDP-7 Unix Progress

[Warren Toomey]

All, a status update on the PDP-7 Unix restoration project at
https://github.com/DoctorWkt/pdp7-unix

The system is pretty much complete now. We have as much of the original
code working as we can. We have rewritten things like the shell and some
other utilities (ls etc.). The ed editor and the native assembler both
work. We also have written a user-mode PDP-7 simulator to test things
and an assembler to make building things faster.

The system boots up under SimH with a filesystem and you can see what things
were like back in 1970.

One big missing utility is roff. As of today, I've written a compiler that
inputs a vaguely C-like language and outputs PDP-7 code. Using this, I've
compiled a minimalist roff which is enough to format man pages. This is
a separate project here: https://github.com/DoctorWkt/h-compiler

Now we are hoping to get the Living Computer Museum people to bring it up
on their real PDP-7. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a disk drive. The
expected solution is to build a disk simulator with an FPGA and SD card.
There is no time frame for this, but it is in the works.

Thanks go to Phil Budne and Robert Swierczek for all their hard work
in building and testing things, and also to Norman Wilson for supplying
scans of the original documents.

Cheers, Warren