[TUHS] port of old unices to i386?

Greg 'groggy' Lehey grog at lemis.com
Sun Nov 10 13:16:07 AEST 2002


On Saturday,  9 November 2002 at 23:18:07 +0100, Jesper Jacobsson wrote:
> Hi there.
>
> I am a linux-user and I came across TUHS for the first time today
> actually when I was searching google for old unices. I love linux and
> am very interested in the history of unix. For some time I have wanted
> to try out some early versions of unix as I am in my early 20's and was
> born too late to have been around those days :( I havn't found any
> people to ask about this till today :) Anyway, I browsed the
> filearchive and I guess the distributions there surely won't work on my
> computer. Is there a way to get them work on a i386 computer? Have
> someone made any ports of an early unix system to i386 out of
> nostalgia? 

Well, I suppose it depends on what you mean by "early UNIX".  FreeBSD,
NetBSD and OpenBSD are all ports of BSD UNIX to at least the i386
architecture.

> If not, could someone take it on as a hobbyproject so that new
> generations of unix-like-OS-users can explore it? It would be both
> fun and also very educational to play around with I am sure.

Well, I suppose you could start with an early version of NetBSD or
FreeBSD and use the machine-dependent parts to port older versions of
UNIX.  But it's a non-trivial task.

Greg
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