[TUHS] Re: forgotten versions

[Angelo Papenhoff <aap@papnet.eu>]

To make people more aware of post-v7 Research UNIX it would be great if
you could actually run all of them in a simulator and have the manuals
available.

V8 is working perfectly in simh and there's blit (jerq) emulation as well.
DMD 5620 emulation should be possible as well with Seth Morabito's
emulator, but as far as I understand it needs a different ROM that we
don't have a dump of. (I've had a real 5620 connected to my laptop
running v8 in simh, it worked perfectly)

V9 exists as a port to Sun-3 and it can actually be booted apparently.
The source seems incomplete, but the VAX kernel source seems to be
included as well. Maybe it could be gotten to run in simh on a VAX
in some form or another?

V10 exists but not as anything that boots. I think getting this to work
would be the holy grail but also requires quite a bit of effort.
I don't know if the V8 and V10 file systems are compatible, but if that
is the case one could probably start by bootstrapping from V8.
It also includes the multilevel-secure IX system and software for the
630 MTG terminal.


As for the manual...

The V8 files have the man pages but not much of the documents.

The V9 files seem to have neither.

The V10 files have both the man pages and the documents but I have not
yet tried to troff any of this.

Since I know at least the V10 manual to be a work of art and beauty I
think it should be available to everyone. I have not seen the physical
V8 and V9 manuals, but if they look anything like the V10 one, they too
deserve to be available to the public.


Does anyone have a plan of attack? I'd gladly join some effort to make
the research systems more visible or available again (but probably don't
have the motivation to do so alone).

Angelo/aap