[TUHS] Re: LSX issues and musing

[Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org>]

> If I can get this working, I have a long laundry list of modifications and
> experiments that I want to run with LSX, but as it stands, this is where I
> am stuck at.

Once upon a time there was a Soviet home computer that was based on the PDP-11, the BK0010:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronika_BK

(it is actually mostly a copy of the Terak 8510a -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terak_8510/a )

The guy that found the surviving floppy with LSX source code (Leonid Broukhis) for the PDP-11 immediately ported it to the BK0010 and created a fair amount of infrastructure around it:

https://github.com/ignusius/bkunix

He used the 2.11BSD toolchain to create a cross-compiler. As that compiler had progressed significantly from the 5th Edition era compiler, the kernel became smaller and he could squeeze some stripped functionality back in. The repo says that the code there still works on a normal PDP-11.

I’ve never communicated with Leonid, but maybe Warren has contact details for him. Also, the person who created LSX unix (Heinz Lycklama) is reading this list -- but of course it has been 40+ years since he last touched the code.

Note that LSX only holds one process in core and swaps other processes (NPROC = 3) out to floppy. It reportedly took several hours for the Terak to self-compile LSX from source. At one point I added debugger support to my own port of LSX to a TI-990 with just floppies ... let’s just say, now I understand deeply why the original Unix debug interface was an improvement opportunity :^)