[TUHS] 1972 UNIX V2 "Beta" Resurrected

[segaloco via TUHS]

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On Tuesday, February 18th, 2025 at 8:36 AM, Yufeng Gao via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> > 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

For the record, I've done a bit of disassembly/restoration work on bits from these tapes, the following two Git repos have some of this work (along with Angelo's V2 B application restorations):

https://gitlab.com/segaloco/v2src

https://gitlab.com/segaloco/v1man
https://gitlab.com/segaloco/v2man

Above are source code restorations of some commands and a roff restoration of the V1/V2 manuals.  I'm happy to hand these repos over to some larger effort as seed stuff for further V2 restoration efforts.

- Matt G.

P.S. While my own work on this stuff has stalled out as I work on some other projects, I am happy to contribute further if someone else is interested in taking over, I just don't see myself able to lead this effort in the near term.