On Fri, Sep 17, 2021 at 8:10 AM Roland via TUHS <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org> wrote:
Hello Unix fanatics,

I have a PDP11/20 and I would love to run an early Unix version on it. I've been working on the hardware for a while and I'm getting more and more of the pieces back online again. The configuration will be two RK05 hard disks, TU56H tape, PC11 paper tape reader/puncher and a RX01 floppy drive. Unfortunately I don't have a MMU or paging option. But it seems that the earliest versions of Unix do not need the extra memory.

Does anyone have RK05 disk images for these early Unix versions? That would be a great help. Otherwise it would be great to have some input about how to create a bootable Unix pack for this machine.

V5 is the earliest Unix we have contemporary images from. We have fragments from everything else earlier, including files scavenged/recovered from early DECtapes and some code recovered from kernel listings from a Unix course that was put together by Bell Labs...

The Unix 1972 project that some TUHS members did. I think it's in the TUHS distribution archive, but also on github. I think Warren Toomey's repo is the canonical one https://github.com/DoctorWkt/unix-jun72 but https://github.com/c3x04/Unix-1st-Edition-jun72 has a couple of newer fixes for a docker file to contain the simh simulator. I'm unsure what hardware that's supported, though.  The machine file suggests:

rk03/rk11   177400     disk             RK
dc11        174000     tty?             (not supp?)
tc11/tu56   177340     dec tape         DTn (not showing up in simh?)
rf11/rs11   177460     fixed head disk  RF
kw11-l      177546     clock            CLK
pc11        177550     paper tape       PTR/PTP
asr-33      177560     tty?             TTI, TTO

which has an RK03, not sure how close that is to an RK05, so some tweaks may be needed.

Warner
 
A bit about the hardware restoring is on the vcfed forum:

Booting RT11 from RK05
TU56H tape drive back online

Thanks in advance!
Roland Huisman