[TUHS] New PDF version of Installing and Using Research Unix Version 7 In the SimH PDP-11/45 and 11/70 Emulators

[Will Senn]

Gregg,

I'm not sure I understand your question exactly, but as mentioned in the 
note, I tested the instructions on Mac OS X Mavericks through MacOS High 
Sierra as well as multiple flavors of FreeBSD 10-11. Your comment 
sparked my interest in trying it out on Windows (maybe that's the OS 
non-grata?), so I tested it there as well. Seems to work, although I 
found the experience distasteful in the extreme . The number of tools 
missing on that OS are mind boggling... but I did get it working. In 
full disclosure, I couldn't bring myself to run it on metal. I just ran 
the Windows  8.1 Enterprise environment in a VM running on Linux Mint 
18.2 (a debian/ubuntu variant).

Just so you know, I have to have a *nix like set of tools on any OS I 
use, these days, or I feel like my left arm is missing, so the minimal 
workable set for me in this case was Git with unix tools (a version on 
MinGW, I think). I used to use Cygwin, but it's so bloated it's 
sickening and the installer is unfriendly to say the least (I would be 
satisfied with a button that said "reasonable set of unix tools", but 
the minimal selection is minimalist, not reasonable). Anyhow, Git with 
unix tools will get you a bash shell that has an almost reasonable set 
of tools. Enough the do the work required for this note anyway. SimH has 
binaries for windows to download. I picked the one that was created 29 
days ago, unzipped it, put it on the path and it just worked. Quite a 
few steps in the prep required minor tweakage (no vi, no emacs - see 
what I mean about minimal not being reasonable, but notepad++ worked ok; 
no gunzip, but gzip -d < zipfile > unzipped worked, perl script didn't 
seem to work right, not sure what that's about - may look into it later, 
since I wrote it, but in the meantime I just downloaded the tap file 
from the archive and it worked fine)...

Bottom line for windows, download the tap file from the archive, create 
two ini files, one for first boot, the other for normal boot and the 
rest of the instructions work verbatim.

I haven't bothered with linux, just cuz I somehow didn't, but I gather 
it will probably work about as well as on the BSD's.

Is that what you were asking, or something more subtle?

Regards,
Will

On 10/12/17 12:32 AM, Gregg Levine wrote:
> Hello!
> (If this is seen twice, then that's because Google complained that the
> mangle list wasn't accepting messages.)
> Will, has this been idea been tested on any of the platforms that the
> emulator runs on? (Not going to mention one in particular by name
> since it's sore spot around here.)
> -----
> Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
> "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
>
>
> On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 1:08 AM, Will Senn <will.senn at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I just finished creating an updated PDF version of a blog post I did a
>> couple of years back, describing how to install and use Unix v7 in SimH.
>> It's updated for 2017 and MacOS High Sierra 10.13. I started the update
>> because I was wanting to do some research in v7 and thought it would be good
>> to have a current set of instructions but really because I was interested in
>> learning a bit about LaTeX and creating prettier, more useful documents. The
>> notes still work fine as originally written, but I organized things a little
>> differently and tweaked some of the language. I thought somebody else might
>> like having a PDF version around so I uploaded the result, call it revision
>> 1.1, and made it publicly accessible (the blog still needs updating,
>> somebody oughta do something about link impermanence, but that's all for
>> another day). Feel free to comment or complain. I added a section in honor
>> of dmr at one commenter's suggestion. Here's the link:
>>
>> https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1_Jn6Hlzym-Zmx1TjR3TENDQTA
>>
>> Later,
>>
>> Will
>>
>> --
>> GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462  7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF
>>
>>

-- 
GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462  7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF