[TUHS] Xenix

Jason Stevens neozeed at gmail.com
Wed Feb 11 04:29:01 AEST 2009


Yeah that's the extent of it.  trust me I was shocked when I tried to
dd a Xenix install, and Qemu booted it right up.  But without a C
compiler it's useless.  I should add that the TCP/IP supported like 3
NIC's... so even *if* you could find it..... it'd be limited.  You can
get the disk to work though.... But not under Qemu, Virtual PC and
VMWare can use it.

The 'issue' is that simply Xenix's method of detecting disk density
doesn't work under any emulator because while it's trying the wrong
thing it will 'work' when it shouldnt...

if you are trying to load a 3 1/5" high density disk, the device is
2/60
Low density is
2/36

so change the device for fd0 to be either....  or even symlink it.

For what it's worth, running it under Virtual PC is fast, however the
console is kind of screwed up.. Xenix uses a nonstandard screen mode
(well for virtual pc's bios that is).

I used to have Microsoft Word for Xenix... in the box and everything.
I'll be dammed if I know where it is. I wish I had managed to keep the
license cards.... :|

And no, outside of a picture from an ad talking about the PDP-11
version of Xenix, and one anicdote in USENET saying that any issues
they had were traced back to Microsoft additions to the system...
there is no trace of it.

But then who knows, maybe someone will post back with something.

On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 1:08 PM, Lorenzo Gatti <gattilorenz at gmail.com> wrote:
> I know they won't release anything, but asking is never a bad thing.
> I saw the lisa and tandy versions, thank you. What I'm searching is
> the PDP-11 one,
> and I doubt I will find it easily. Do any of you have it?
> BTW, even the x86 version is not working well in emulators.
> Well, at least you cannot install it, but if you have a dd image of a
> working xenix system, this will boot fine in bochs/qemu.
> But you won't be able to use disks (at least images, never tried the
> real disks) to install new software, lol.
> So it's basically a closed system, if you don't connect it to another
> xenix (virtual?) machine via virtual serial port.
>
> 2009/2/10 Jason Stevens <neozeed at gmail.com>:
>> I doubt SCO/Microsoft will release anything.. but then you never know.
>>  Do you have Xenix for the PDP-11?  I've seen the lisa & Tandy 68000
>> floating around, but both used some custom MMU so that cut out
>> emulators... lol I haven't even bothered asking for source, as I
>> figured these v6/v7 things are basically lost in the mists of time...
>> but then there is v6/v7 for the Pdp-11/Interdata 32b & the recent port
>> of v7 to the i386 http://nordier.com/v7x86/index.html
>



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