[TUHS] late research unix question

Tim Newsham: Does anyone know if emulators are capable of running 8th ed unix or later? What about emulation of the bitblit? ======== Who knows what blitjerq lurks in the hearts of men? Seriously, an emulator with appropriate CPU settings should be able to run latter-day Research UNIX without much trouble. 8/e would need a VAX-11/780 or 750; 10/e would work on a VAX 8550 or 8700 (only one CPU, though) or a MicroVAX II or III. I forget just when the MicroVAX work was first done (by Ted Kowalski, who in an earlier day wrote fsck), so I'm not sure at what point in the 9/e era it appeared; but since 8/e was the last really organized tape we made, it doesn't really matter. As others have pointed out, the blit/jerq code didn't run on the VAX, but in a separate terminal. For that you'd need an emulator for the MC68000 or the WE32100. By the time the 8/e tape was cut, the 68K-based Blits had pretty much been retired; I'm not sure that code would be as interesting to resurrect as that for the WE32100-based Teletype 5620 DMD. Of course you'd also have to emulate all the I/O devices, including the decidedly-non-PS/2 keyboard and mouse. I don't remember for sure any more (maybe Dennis does), but the jerq code may have been on a separate tape because the special C compiler for that CPU chip wasn't easily redistributed--it came from the commercial side of AT&T, not the research part. Norman Wilson Toronto ON _______________________________________________ TUHS mailing list TUHS(a)minnie.tuhs.org https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs