On Thu, Sep 22, 2022 at 3:00 AM Ralph Corderoy <ralph@inputplus.co.uk>
wrote:

> Hi Arnold,
>
> > For those of us not involved with Unix in 1977, what was the
> > HRSTS system?
>
> ‘The Harvard/Radcliffe Student Time-sharing System Terminal Users Guide,
>  1st edition, September 10, 1974, Center for Research in Computing
>  Technology, Harvard University’.
>

These are the same folks that also did the LISP that appeared in various
2BSD
distributions as well.

I had a bit of a sleepless night last night... So I took a look at it and
I'm less hopeful
about being able to rebuild the system.

There's a special C compiler. We have the binaries for it and instructions
on how
to build the source. But those instructions refer to files that aren't in
the system
and not in the few historic unix distributions from around that time. At
least there's
a binary.

Next, the kernel lacks the makefiles / build scripts, but so does v6, so
maybe
that's par for the course.

There's a lot of userland changes (for libh and libg), but other than the
libraries and a few special progarms (pl1, macro11, link11, etc), so I'm
assuming
that most of the stock 6th edition could be used.

Finally, how do I bootstrap? Is this a "Install v6, and then build our cool
stuff"
or is that also a missing piece.

So there's a number of challenges here....  This was definitely not the era
of
fully integrated reproducible build systems...

Warner


> Tucker Taft was involved back then.
> https://www.adahome.com/Rogues/taft.html
> https://twitter.com/sttaft
>
> --
> Cheers, Ralph.
>