Some changes forecast for the PUPS Archive & web site

[Warren Toomey]

[ apologies to those who get this twice ]

Hi all, I just thought I'd let you know that there will be some changes
with the PUPS Archive and the web site coming along soon.

As you know, SCO has dropped their Ancient UNIX license to $0.00. In a
matter of days, they will provide a web form on their web site so that
you can agree to the license. After you have done this, you will be
able to obtain 5th-7th Edition UNIX, 32V, Mini UNIX and PDP-11 System III
from their web site.

I am hoping that you will also be able to click through to a CGI script
on the PUPS web site, where you can put in your full name and e-mail
address, and you will be granted access to the larger PUPS Archive. I
need to collect name/e-mail addresses, so that later if you ask for a copy
of the Archive on CD or other media, we can verify that you have agreed
to the new SCO license.

I am modifying the PUPS Archive so that it will be accessible via both
FTP and HTTP. The access mechanism will also allow mirrors of the Archive
to be set up. SO: if you have a good 24-hr/day network connection and
about 1G of disk space available, I would be most grateful if you could
set up a mirror of the PUPS Archive.

The mechanism to request PUPS on CD has been streamlined, but it still
depends on volunteers to help out with the copying. If you can volunteer
to do this as well, we would be most grateful. We will be even more
grateful once the free SCO license gets Slashdotted :-)

One thing I definitely need to do is to tidy up and/or reorganise the
PUPS web site at http://minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au/PUPS. I'll try to do this
over the next 6-8 weeks. Any suggestions or comments are welcome!

The PUPS Archive itself needs some attention. For example, some of the
systems like PWB, 32V and System III are either incomplete or haven't
been fuly extracted into a portable format like tar. I would welcome any
offers to help curate & fix up the archive.

When this _does_ get slashdotted, and it will, the first thing people
will want to do is either view the old source, or bring up the old
versions. Is there a volunteer who would like to bring the disk
images in Boot_Images up to date, and provide better instructions so
that a PDP-newbie can boot V5, V6, V7, 2.11BSD on the common emulators
such as Ersatz, Supnik, Begemot etc.

And finally, the machine running the PUPS Archive, minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au,
will be replaced in the next week or two. Currently, minnie is a 486DX100,
and I have a Celeron 400 with FreeBSD 4.0 installed as her replacement.
There will be some broken functionality after I switch over, knowing Murphy's
Law. Please e-mail me with details if you spot something that isn't right.

That's about it. There's a lot to do. I'd love some help :-)

Cheers!
	Warren