[TUHS] 1972 UNIX V2 "Beta" Resurrected

[Yufeng Gao via TUHS]

   > From: Angelo Papenhoff

   > So the next step would be to restore the assembly source? :)

It would be a fun project restoring the source code (there's a warm and a cold kernel, so they can be diffed to work out the ifdefs). In fact, I did disassemble vcboot and bos, as well as half the warm UNIX kernel, but in my infinite wisdom, I decided to name the IDA databases f1/f2/f3 and accidentally deleted them while cleaning up my desktop :((.


    > From: Noel Chiappa

    > It will be interesting to see what it reveals, as it's in the UNIX 'dark age'
    > between V1 and V4. Working from hints and clues in the extant 'UNIX
    > Programmer's Manual: Second Edition', I had tried to figure out how V2
    > differed from V1:

I have some UNIX V2, V3 and V4 binaries (no kernels) recovered from DMR's DECtapes, plus a kernel driver or two from slightly earlier than nsys. Also, I have a few V4 distribution documents. I'm still slowly recovering stuff from those tapes, but most of what I've recovered is here (https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Applications/Dennis_Tapes/Gao_Analysis/) (thank you Warren for hosting them!) if they interest you.

    > I was mostly just trying to work out how the mysterious KS11
    > worked.

Sadly, this kernel does not have the KS11 stuff. The last1120c tape has binaries from a (or the, since there was only one?) machine with the KS11, as well as an earlier C compiler still called "nc". Of course, they're effectively V3+ binaries that use the EAE, so they won't really help with knowing how the KS11 worked.

    > It would be very interesting to know what fails. By 'hang', do you mean
    > 'ceases making progress', or 'halts'?

Don't quote me on this, but I think under E11, it hangs in a loop before getting to init(7), and under SIMH, it bus errors while running init(7). Though I'll need to double-check SIMH because I may have used unix-jun72's /etc/init instead of the one from s2.

Sincerely,
Yufeng