[TUHS] Fwd: Choice of Unix for 11/03 and 11/23+ Systems

[John Cowan]

I suppose this is teaching your grandmother(s) to suck eggs, but if you are
not messing with the kernel or drivers, I find apout to be delightful.

On Thu, Sep 24, 2020 at 9:04 AM Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

>     > From: Paul Riley
>
>     > On my physical '03 I have twin Sykes floppy drives. I note that in
> the
>     > LSX archives there is a Sykes driver, so I can adapt that I guess.
>
> Yes, here:
>
>  https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=LSX/sys/sykfd.c
>
> It looks like it should be a straight drop-in, to run it on Mini-Unix. Not
> sure if your controller is the exact same model, though? Is there any
> documentation on yours? (I haven't done any searching.)
>
> If you want to boot from it, you'll need to write a bootstrap for it; I
> poked
> around, but didn't see one. (Not sure how they booted machines with one,
> back
> in the day; maybe it wasn't the only drive, and they booted off something
> else.)  You can probably modify the RX one:
>
>   https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=LSX/src/rxboot.s
>   https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=LSX/src/rxboot2.s
>
> Note that this is a 2-stage bootstrap, apparently as a result of the small
> hardware block size on the RX.
>
> And of course there's still the issue of 'how to get bits onto it'. Can
> floppies for it be written on some other kind of machine? If so, someone on
> the Classic Computers list:
>
>   http://www.classiccmp.org/mailman/listinfo/cctalk
>
> may be able to help you write those, or an RL02 pack.
>
>
> You should start by getting some experience building V6 OS loads (Mini-Unix
> will be _very_ similar); use a simulator. I have a lengthy tutorial here:
>
>   http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/V6Unix.html
>
> It's in terms of Ersatz-11, which I prefer because it has that nice DOS
> device,
> which makes it easy to get files into the Unix (so I can use my normal
> editor on
> the host machine). However, I gather most people prefer SIMH; there is a
> tutorial
> here:
>
>   https://gunkies.org/wiki/Running_Unix_v6_in_SIMH
>
> (I didn't write it; I know nothing of SIMH) for that option.
>
> How do people using SIMH get files into a Unix running on one? Larry Allen
> just wrote a PDP-11 simulator in Rust, and he's thinking about adding a
> paper-tape reader (connectable to a file), so that if he installs the stock
> V6 PTR driver, he can just do 'cat /dev/ptr > myfile'; sort of like how
> VM/370 used the virtual card reader.
>
>        Noel
>
>
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