On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 4:25 AM, Paul Ruizendaal <pnr@planet.nl> wrote:
> Venix/86 and Venix/86R might be interesting... I have impure versions of
> both...
+1
Venix/86 is the first Unix to run on PC hardware that I’m aware of. It could
go together with Idris and Minix as examples of early PC Unix.
I have a set of both the original Venix/86R disks (>From Venturicom) as well as the Boston Software Works modifications (which made it usable, honestly). I also have ported the v7 date code to this and fixed the y2k bug in it. Is any of that interesting to TUHS?
I have a low-priority project that I'm working on towards the 40th anniversary of V7: I'd like to reconstruct the complete sources to the version of Venix that I have and have it running on my DEC Rainbow 100B in time based on sources I've compiled from scratch. It looks like about 90% of the system is there unmodified....
I also had a crazy pipe dream of getting Ultrix-11M ported over once I had the machine dependent files from Venix... But the lack of any network cards (at least available network cards) for my Rainbow has put a bit of a damper on my enthusiasm for that (since the 11M port was basically V7 + bug fixes - packet interface + sockets).
Then again, someone else mentioned hypervisors... I was looking at hacking FreeBSD's BHYVE to emulate the old hardware so I can run things faster (but there's issues with timing loops in the old software that I'm sure will bedevil any such road).
If only my body could execute fast enough on the things my brain thinks would be cool to do...