From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: usotsuki@buric.co (Steve Nickolas) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2016 17:21:31 -0500 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] merry christmas In-Reply-To: References: <20161225031637.GF12180@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 26 Dec 2016, Nick Downing wrote: > I'm only an occasional contributor to the list, more of a lurker really > since I was pretty busy this year. Well I promised a guy on the list some > Unixy stuff that I had and have been gradually going through it and putting > it on bitbucket but have not had time to write it all up yet. I'm mostly a lurker myself. > But I wanted to jump in and say something to the new people who joined the > list owing to whatever was the recent media coverage we had. Welcome and > all that. But IT ISN'T NECESSARY to have been around at the inception of > Unix to get into it and to learn about the retro flavours, come up to speed > in PDP-11 asm or learn about the old filesystems or whatever it is that > floats your boat :) QFT > Personally when I discover something AWESOME I immediately want to take it > apart and learn EVERYTHING about it. For me in the case of Unix, I quit my > job in about 2005 and had about 3-6 months of downtime while considering my > next moves, I had next to no money so I could not really leave the house, > but I had a houseful of computers and a 33.6k modem so I set myself the > task of learning about this mysterious Linux thing. I downloaded Slackware > 4.0 onto a set of floppies and followed the Linux From Scratch instructions > to build and bring up my own Linux flavour from that. I got some exposure in the mid-late 90s on a Solaris shell before experimenting with Linux. Actually, I installed DJGPP on one of my PCs so I got a basic feel for how the command line stuff worked even before I had Linux operational on my own systems. > This was very educational and it highlights the main point of my post which > is you MUST GET YOUR HANDS DIRTY, reading ancient source code is fine but > one doesn't retain much info unless one reads for a purpose (why the hell > won't this RK05 boot my system etc). So anyway a lot of things still > remained a bit mysterious after my LFS adventures since they are that way > for historical reasons, and I found myself bringing up earlier Unices on > simh to take a peek and joining this list etc. Knowing about the history of Unix certainly makes some of the decisions in Linux make more sense. > But as I said one does not retain much unless one has a purpose and > probably the project that taught me the most was bringing up someone's > hobby Unix V7 clone on a cash register motherboard from the equipment I > used to sell in my day job. The software is called UZI (Unix Z80 > implementation). I played around with a fork of UZI on an MSX emulator once. Interesting stuff, that. > Long story short the thing was soon utilizing various kinds of bank > switched memory available in this cash register (which had a Z180 CPU and > hence behaved like a Z80 with an MMU and other integrated peripherals) and > had a network stack from Phil Karn's NOS, it had lots of communication > ports for barcode scanners, printers, modem etc and I had them running SLIP > and communicating with publicly available FTP servers, I used to use > mirror.aarnet.edu.au for testing and my cash register could download small > files. > > I became frustrated with the limitations of both UZI and NOS and decided to > port 2.11BSD to the cash register as the next step, my goal was (a) make it > cross compile from Linux to PDP-11, (b) check it can build an identical > release tape through cross compilation, (c) port it to Z80 using my > existing cross compiler. A Z180 is powerful enough to run 2.11BSD? o.o; > Although I was not around for early Unix (was probably a 10yr old taking > apart an Apple II and trying to learn 6502 code without the benefit of an > assembler in 1985 when stuff like SVR4 was popular) I probably know as much > about its internals and development environment as many people here, due to > having got my hands dirty, albeit 30 years later. I was messing around on the Apple //e back then myself. Didn't know anything about ASM until many years later (I was *5* back then), but I probably could have learned it since the //c and the later version of the //e had built-in mini-assemblers. > In fact I FEEL LIKE I WAS THERE. So my suggestion to newbies is, get > your simh on, and tackle some interesting project such as reconstructing > an early source for something from the fragmentary surviving pieces, > backporting some useful tool to an earlier Unix, or whatever. Just get > your hands dirty and it will be an infinitely rewarding experience. > Because Unix is AWESOME. Retrocomputing is AWESOME. Simulators are > AWESOME. :) Heck, even v7x86 is probably enough to learn with. -uso.