[TUHS] Running v7 in Open-SIMH - update for 2024

[TUHS] Running v7 in Open-SIMH - update for 2024

[Will Senn]

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All,

I can't believe it's been 9 years since I wrote up my original notes on 
getting Research Unix v7 running in SIMH. Crazy how time flies. Well, 
this past week Clem found a bug in my scripts that create tape images. 
It seem like they were missing a tape mark at the end. Not a showstopper 
by any means, but we like to keep a clean house. So, I applied his fixes 
and updated the scripts along with the resultant tape image and Warren 
has updated them in the archive:

https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Keith_Bostic_v7/

I've also updated the note to address the fixes, to use the latest 
version of Open-SIMH on Linux Mint 21.3 "Virginia" (my host of choice 
these days), and to bring the transcripts up to date:

https://decuser.github.io/unix/research-unix/v7/2024/05/23/research-unix-v7-3.2.html

Later,

Will


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[TUHS] Re: Running v7 in Open-SIMH - update for 2024

[G. Branden Robinson]

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Hi Will,

At 2024-05-23T13:58:22-0500, Will Senn wrote:
> I can't believe it's been 9 years since I wrote up my original notes
> on getting Research Unix v7 running in SIMH. Crazy how time flies.
> Well, this past week Clem found a bug in my scripts that create tape
> images. It seem like they were missing a tape mark at the end. Not a
> showstopper by any means, but we like to keep a clean house. So, I
> applied his fixes and updated the scripts along with the resultant
> tape image
[...]

I'd like to join the many people who have previously thanked you for
this work.  Your resource made V7 Unix troff and nroff accessible to me,
and that access has been invaluable to me in my efforts on groff.

Regards,
Branden

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[TUHS] Re: Running v7 in Open-SIMH - update for 2024

[Will Senn]

Hi Branden,

On 5/23/24 2:01 PM, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> Hi Will,
>
> At 2024-05-23T13:58:22-0500, Will Senn wrote:
>> I can't believe it's been 9 years
> [...]
>
> I'd like to join the many people who have previously thanked you for
> this work.  Your resource made V7 Unix troff and nroff accessible to me,
> and that access has been invaluable to me in my efforts on groff.
>
> Regards,
> Branden
Aw, you definitely made my day. As a regular user of groff, I am 
thrilled to have helped, even in this small way.

Will

[TUHS] Re: Running v7 in Open-SIMH - update for 2024

[Clem Cole]

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FYI - POR is to push some new tools I have been creating into OpenSIMH
shortly.

In fairness to Will, this is in the class of a "2-minute minor," not a
"4-minute major."  I back into this issue as I was working on Oscar's new
PiDP-10 and moving a very old (v6 syntax) UNIXC program that manipulates
PDP-10 backup and TOPS-20 Dumper images.  PDP-10s do things in 36 bits,
which does not map cleanly to the 8 data bits of a 9-track tape (you don't
want to know what the 10 does unless you have to deal with it).  So, I
wrote some tools to better examine and flexibly manipulate TAP files [the
debug code for tapes in SIMH is a bit of a mess].  Anyway, as I was testing
something, I thought I had made an error in my new tap_decode(1) tool when
I was looking at the v7.tap.gz file that Warren has in the TUHS archives
(that Will supplied/created with his mktape scripts).   When I looked more
carefully, it was missing a record. It turns out SIMH will silently
"attach" a TAP image without a proper 9-track logical end-of-tape (it
should give a warning).  It also turns out Will's directions never looked
for the actual 9-track EOT records - so nobody ever saw this.  I mentioned
it to him quietly - cudo's for coming clean.

FWIW: I always recommend Will's documents for V6 and V7 (in fact, we point
to them in the OpenSIMH archives at my suggestion).  The truth is, I wish
we had had access to a few more that are as good as Will's for some of the
other OSses.

Clem
ᐧ

On Thu, May 23, 2024 at 2:58 PM Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:

> All,
>
> I can't believe it's been 9 years since I wrote up my original notes on
> getting Research Unix v7 running in SIMH. Crazy how time flies. Well, this
> past week Clem found a bug in my scripts that create tape images. It seem
> like they were missing a tape mark at the end. Not a showstopper by any
> means, but we like to keep a clean house. So, I applied his fixes and
> updated the scripts along with the resultant tape image and Warren has
> updated them in the archive:
>
> https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Keith_Bostic_v7/
>
> I've also updated the note to address the fixes, to use the latest version
> of Open-SIMH on Linux Mint 21.3 "Virginia" (my host of choice these days),
> and to bring the transcripts up to date:
>
>
> https://decuser.github.io/unix/research-unix/v7/2024/05/23/research-unix-v7-3.2.html
>
> Later,
>
> Will
>
>
>

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