This Old Micro

Discussion - More Old Unix

Tom M. — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:59:00 GMT

Someone who shall remain nameless sent me a bunch of disk images for two operating systems: Interactive UNIX Operating System V/386 Version 3.2 Too cool. This is the full multi-user system with networking, development, 3+ user license, man pages, kernel config, STREAMS, and more. Although I never ran this one in the day, it will be exactly like the Microport SVR3.2.2 I did run. Microport SVR3.3.3 - This is the base system and nothing else. Seems like this one is the jackpot. With Inte

Discussion - UNIX On Old Apple Hardware

Tom M. — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 14:23:20 GMT

I will very soon be installing Apple's original Unix product, A/UX, on a Motorola 68040 based Mac, a Quadra 800. I should be receiving the machine this week. I have absolutely no experience with old Mac equipment, so this should be fun. This is a NuBus Mac with lots of capability, but I have no idea what I might want to stick in it, or even what A/UX will support. It's got a SCSI bus and an internal SCSI drive, along with a slot for a SCSI CD-ROM, which is not present. I'll need to purchas

Discussion - A/UX

Tom M. — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:13:05 GMT

I'm soon (next few weeks) going to be bringing up an A/UX system running on a Mac Quadra 800. A/UX was Apple's first Unix operating system for the Mac, and ran on Motorola 68030 and 040 processors - The Mac II and Quadra series. It's a System V R2.2 kernel with BSD and SVR3 extensions, including TCP/IP and Streams. It is probably one of the most elegant and stable, true Unix systems ever built. Physically, it will be running on a Quadra 800: 68040 33MHz, 68MB RAM, SCSI with a couple of dis

Discussion - Review: "The Unix System V Environment"

Tom M. — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:30:58 GMT

I think I mentioned a while back that I have a pretty large and growing collection of old computer books - these are mostly serious things - no "Unix For Dummies" kind of stuff. They encompass several broad ranges of topics: operating systems, programming languages, algorithms, networking, and computer history. So I thought that over time I might catalog them and maybe write up some reviews for others with similar interests, if there are any. I haven't been very diligent in doing that, though

Discussion - Finally did some programming in CP/M

Tom M. — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:55:49 GMT

Not a whole lot to report , but I did write one utility program this weekend in Turbo Pascal for my CP/M system. This one was a simple clone of the UNIX more(1) program. Since CP/M only comes with the built-in "type", similar to UNIX's cat(1), I thought it would be both useful and educational to rewrite more in pascal. In the end, I think I accomplished both goals. more is useful for looking through text files like program source listings, and programming it got me back into a few things i

Sergio Pedraja

Sergio P. — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 17:06:43 GMT

My Profile

Tom Manos

Tom M. — Sun, 17 May 2009 14:40:52 GMT

Who, me?

Tom Manos

Tom M. — Sun, 17 May 2009 14:40:52 GMT

Who, me?

Discussion - Version 7 UNIX

Tom M. — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:29:23 GMT

I've spent some nights recently getting Robert Nordier's port of AT&T Version 7 UNIX running on some old hardware. After a couple of hours of initial frustration, I was successful, and I've got to say, this is cool enough that I'm going to play with it pretty extensively over the next month or two. Mostly I'm excited because as I've said before in other posts, I'm interested in the evolution of UNIX, and to understand this, you can't just be familiar with Linux. I've got pretty extensive e

Discussion - Another old programming joke

Rudy S. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:04:32 GMT

I saw Tom's post, and thought I'd add one of my own! Much of this is incredibly old, coming from the USENET group net.misc. All UUCP, and before the Internet (does anyone other than me remember it?) If you've been around a while, you might notice some names you've seen before. Rudy -------------------------------------- Well, here it is: the long awaited list of "Merry Christmas" programs. If you are a crawled-out-from-under-a-rock sort of person and don't know what's going on

Discussion - Old Programming Joke

Tom M. — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:00:32 GMT

This really doesn't have much to do with Ancient UNIX, but I thought someone might appreciate it, anyway... Culled off the USENET long ago: The proliferation of modern programming languages which seem to have stolen countless features from each other sometimes when it makes it difficult to remember which language you're using. This guide is offered as a public service to help programmers in such dilemmas. C: You shoot yourself in the foot. Assembly: You crash the OS and ove

Tom Manos

Tom M. — Sun, 17 May 2009 14:40:52 GMT

Who, me?

Discussion - Trek

Tom M. — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 23:32:56 GMT

I'm fascinated by old UNIX games and have a bunch of them on my SVR4 system. Today I found the sources of the original Eric Allman version of trek in C. This one came from a Version 7 UNIX source archive. It's a terrific game in that it has a fair amount of complexity, and is test only. It even predates curses, so doesn't use full screen test graphics. Now I have a pretty good collection of ancient games, including: * trek * the original colossal cave adventure * rogue (the mother of

Discussion - Storms!

Tom M. — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:58:44 GMT

Significant nor'easter this week with high winds (60mph) and heavy rains for a couple of days. Major flooding throughout the Hampton Roads region. Flooding and wind causes a lot of downed trees, which in turn caused many power outages. My home and this server are out in the country, and we are usually the first to get the power outages, but this time it took quite a while, and the one outage was less than a second, but enough to bring down the server, which did not automatically restart. It t

Ancient UNIX

Tom M. — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:38:24 GMT

A group for those interested in old UNIX operating systems. I suppose anything older than Linux or the current crop of {open|free|net}BSD or Solaris is ok. I was thinking more of the AT&T System V or Seventh Edition and older, or early BSD systems.

Ancient UNIX

Tom M. — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:38:24 GMT

Ancient UNIX

Tom M. — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:38:24 GMT

Kaypro Commercial

Tom M. — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:50:00 GMT

A great piece of computer history!

UNIX History

Tom M. — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:05:00 GMT

As told by Thompson & Ritchie...

Discussion - Version 7 UNIX Manuals

Tom M. — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:26:33 GMT

I uploaded PDFs of the original V7 UNIX manuals into the Doc Management tab. These are fascinating historical documents containing lots of information from the beginnings of UNIX. Download and take a look! Volume 1 is the usual man set - commands, libraries, API, file formats, etc. Volume 2a is detailed info about various subsystems and UNIX in general Volume 2b is more subsystems (yacc, lex, and much more) -Tom

Discussion - Zork! Manual

Tom M. — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:48:54 GMT

One of the first games I can remember playing was Zork! on my first microcomputer: a TRS-80 Model I with audio cassette storage. Probably like lots of you, I spent way too much playing this game when it came out in 1980. I eventually won the game, and then had more fun playing the sequels. Later, I ran Zork and similar games on UNIX machines, but honestly, I hadn't thought of Zork in quite a while. Last night, however, I ran across a pdf file of the original 1980 Infocom PDP-11 Zork man

This Old Micro

ConcourseConnect S. — Sun, 17 May 2009 14:42:08 GMT

A Site For Retro Computing and Gaming Enthusiasts. TRS-80, Apple, Commodore, Atari, Sun, CP/M, PDP-11, VAX, old UNIX, we love them all.

Computer History Museum

Bob N. — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:45:28 GMT

The Computer History Museum, in the heart of Silicon Valley, invites you to visit us to see and experience one of the world's largest collections of computing artifacts.

Discussion - Serial Ports and Modems

Tom M. — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:03:20 GMT

I finally got around to connecting up some serial gear to my SVR4 box, wyvern last weekend . First I connected a VT320 terminal I've got and used the sysadm gui to get a getty running on /dev/tty00. In short, the terminal runs great at 9600bps. Wow! Does that ever bring me back! Then I tried getting my US Robotics V.everything running; no joy! I'm not sure whether the problem is a serial port setup issue, a serial cable issue, or a modem issue. I'm checking around for another modem, but

Discussion - 360K Floppy Woes

Tom M. — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:38:00 GMT

Well, I've been trying to get a decent 360K floppy drive on my DOS box to create reliable floppies for my Kaypro 4. I've tried three different drives and while they seem to work on the DOS box, the floppies it writes often do not work on the Kaypro. Ideas?

Discussion - Zmodem

Tom M. — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 02:28:55 GMT

The subject of Chuck Forsberg and Zmodem is an interesting one, but I'll leave the folklore for another post. Tonight I compiled up an ancient version of sz/rz and got an old Windows terminal program called Hyperterm Private Edition working on my Windows XP box. Hyperterm is both a serial terminal and a telnet client, and has a nice dialing directory and a pretty fair set of terminal emulations, though I only had time to try vt102. It also has a full suite of up/download protocols, includ

Security

Tom M. — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 04:00:00 GMT

I spent an hour this evening getting the firewall in order. I was getting a lot of intrusion attempts on the ssh port (22), so I restricted the port by IP address and now I bet my secure log will be very cle an.

If you run a web server (or mail server or ...), you really need to insure that all unessential services are turned off, and that your firewall is set to reject or drop everything unwanted.

There are lots of good iptables references out there. Just search for "iptables howto" or "iptables tutorial". One that might get you started if you don't already know what you're doing is at the Fedora project. It is relevant to most Linux distributions, not just Fedora.

I would post

Discussion - UUCP

Tom M. — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 23:23:39 GMT

I've started the process of getting UUCP up and running again on a modem. The memory balks at the details, but it should come back to me with time. Like many these days, I am not really interested in installing and paying for a second phone line, so my alternatives seem to be doing UUCP over TCP, or trying VOIP. Just because I think it will be more fun, and it sure will be more authentic, I'll first try VOIP. I ordered a Magicjack. This thing provides unlimited local and long distance for

Discussion - Kaypro 4 Screen, Graphics, and Keyboard Documentation

Tom M. — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 10:00:09 GMT

I've been working on getting my Kaypro 4-84 ready for serious use, and I'm about there. Recently I learned how to build Kaypro 4 CP/M diskettes from an MS-DOS machine I have, and I've got all the development tools I need. So now I want to start doing some CP/M assembler development, and I needed to do some screen addressing and couldn't figure out what kind of terminal I was dealing with. Well after a fair amount of looking around, I discovered that Kaypros emulate ADM-3A terminals, so that i

Discussion - AT&T System V Release 4

Tom M. — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 22:04:50 GMT

I've been running SVR4 here at home on period hardware for quite some time, and it's getting time to get it out in the big world. So here's what I've done and still have yet to do: I've built a telnet shell on my modern machine that allows anyone with an account on SVR4 to ssh into the modern machine and automatically be telnetted onto SVR4. This is good because wyvern, the SVR4 machine, is on a private, unroutable network. community, this machine has two network interfaces, the public side (

Kaypro Progress!

Tom M. — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 09:40:00 GMT

I've had a breakthrough in preparing Kaypro 4 CP/M diskettes. In the end it was much simpler than I imagined it would be.

read on for more...

AT&T 3B2

Rudy S. — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 13:46:18 GMT

For AT&T 3B2 Supermicro Enthusiasts. Discussing operations, restoration, software, hardware.

Network Cleanup

Tom M. — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 10:50:00 GMT

I mentioned a while back that I was working on cleaning up all the computer junk I have laying around, and I've completed a lot of it. Now for the last part: the network.

Read on for more...

Tom Manos

Tom M. — Sun, 17 May 2009 14:40:52 GMT

Who, me?

Tidewater Unix Users Group

Tom M. — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 16:44:12 GMT

Hampton Roads VA Unix & Linux Users Group

Back in the Saddle

Tom M. — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 13:25:00 GMT

I've been gone for a week, but things are back in motion here at the Community now.

The network is working fine, I've got the firewall set up reasonably well, and VMWare player is installed and operating, although I really don't know how to make it sing yet.

Wyvern is back up, and available via telnet from this server, but you have to be able to ssh in here first. I'll work on a way for others to get in when I have time. I don't think I'll be handing out shell accounts on this host.

Backups of Community are being pulled every night now.

The next big improvement will be the installation of the Management CRM, allowing me to communicate with members much more efficiently. Hopefully that will go in sometime late this week.

All in all, things are moving along well!

Not Enough Time!

Tom M. — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 12:05:00 GMT

Things have been lagging here, and there have been some technical problems. And unfortunately, nothing much will happen for the next week, either.

Discussion - Hardware Upgrade Complete

Tom M. — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 20:12:10 GMT

Ok, the hardware upgrade is complete! The site is now running on a new and much larger server. This one has 4 2.1GHz cores, 8GB of ECC RAM, 1TB of RAID 1, and 2 Gb Ethernet cards. I am hoping to run VMWare here soon and bring up a few other sites. There are also a number of other improvements I have in mind that will be coming in the near term. Stay tuned!