[TUHS] Getting Unix v5 to talk

[Mark Longridge]

Thanks to the efforts of Jonathan Gevaryahu I have managed
to get the Unix v5 speak utility to compile and execute.
All this was done using the simh emulator emulating a
PDP-11/70.

Jonathan managed extract enough of speak.c to reconstruct it
to the point it could be compiled with v5 cc. I believe it
was necessary to look at speak.o to accomplish this.

Jonathan also states that there are more interesting things
that could possibly be recovered from v6doc.tar.gz

One can look at speak.c source here:

http://www.maxhost.org/other/speak.c

Now had we have speak compiled we can go a bit further:

cat speak.v - | speak -v null
  generates speak.m from ascii file speak.v

speak speak.m
 computer
 !p         (prints out phonetics for working word)
 which outputs:
 ,k,a0,m,p,E2,U1,t,er,-1
 ctrl-d exits

Looking at speak.c we can see that it opens /dev/vs.
Fortunately we have the file /usr/sys/dmr/vs.c to look at
so this could be compiled into the kernel although I haven't
done this as yet.

speak.c looks like Unix v5 era code. My understanding is that
Unix v5 appeared in June 1974 and the comments say 'Copyright 1974'
so it seems plausible.

I'm intrigued by the possibility of getting Unix v5 to talk.

Mark