[TUHS] What UNIX Artifacts Are Still Missing?

Angelo Papenhoff aap at papnet.eu
Wed Dec 6 08:55:39 AEST 2017


On 06/12/17, Warren Toomey wrote:
> All, it's time to nudge the conversation away from debugging 2017 OOM issues
> and the pre-UNIX history of the Arpanet.
> 
> We've been able to recover quite a deal of UNIX artifacts in the past two
> decades, but what artifacts (in your opinion) are still out there that
> we should try and unearth? Remember that the 50th anniversary is coming up
> in 2019.
> 
> Here's my list:
>  - more PDP-7 source code: the shell, the rest of the utilities
>  - more 1st Edition source code: the rest of the utilities
>  - ditto the missing bits of 3rd, 4th and 5th Editions
>  - the Phil Foglio artwork that became a Usenix t-shirt (Armando, any ideas?)
>  - more details on who was Ted Bashkow, and the story behind his (+ others?)
>    analysis of the 1st Edition kernel at http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Dennis_v1/PreliminaryUnixImplementationDocument_Jun72.pdf
>  - a firm date on the day that Ken added pipes to the kernel :)
> 
> What else should be we looking for? What physical artifacts (drawings,
> artwork etc.) have we missed that should be sought after?
> 
> Cheers, Warren

(Replied off list accidentally, sorry Warren)

I totally agree that having more of V2-V4 would be great.

Recently, I've become interested in the UNIX development at AT&T.
There is SysIII for PDP-11 and VAX and both work in simh.
With SysVR1 I only found the PDP-11 version, would be cool to have the
VAX version too. But turning to older stuff...there is not much info
about the UNICES that were to become SysIII. I'm talking PWB (there is
PWB/1.0 in the archive that I will try to get running soon, but I
understand there were more versions), CB UNIX (only scans of it it
seems) and the elusive UNIX/TS in various versions.
I'm aware that these were not released under the ancient UNIX license,
however the web source view on TUHS has the source code for SysIII and
SysV and most of it can be found on archive.org as well, so the fact
that they're not part of the public TUHS archive is a bit weird.

BTW, I'm currently putting together installation instructions for
various
old UNICES on http://a.papnet.eu/UNIX/. And I also ported aiju's blit
emulator to Unix recently (ran on plan 9 originally):
https://github.com/aap/blit So have fun running v8 with this.

aap




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