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Ancient UNIX

Chesapeake, VA

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Version 7 UNIX

11/21/2009 9:29 AM (edited)
Tom Manos photo

By Tom Manos

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 experience with AT&T System V Release 2, 3, and 4, but not much before that. V7 provides a large body of missing knowledge. Although V7 is quite recognizable as UNIX, it's quite a different feeling from SVRx.

I've been talking to Robert Nordier via email (he's in Durban, South Africa), and I'm hoping I can add some "period" software to the distribution. Time will tell on this one.

I hope to be showing the system soon, and maybe I'll even be able to make it available on the net. This will be a bit of a trick, since V7 had no IP stack.

Stay tuned for more...

RE: Version 7 UNIX

1. 11/22/2009 10:55 PM
Tom Manos photo

By Tom Manos

I spent a few hours today getting my v7 system a bit more hardened, although hardened is not a good description for this beast.

I now have it running on a smaller, dedicated machine (P2, 64MB, 6GB, 2 serial), and have managed to set up a serial terminal I have here, and also a direct serial connection to wyvern, my SVR4 box.

The serial connection is running with c-kermit at the moment, and I've managed to copy the source code to g-kermit over to v7. Compiling it may be a different story. G-kermit was written for newer architectures, and I'm having to do a fair amount of fiddling around to get it to compile at all. It's probably going to take me a couple of days at a minimum, if I can get it going at all.

Then it's on to trek, snobol, and other stuff. I also want too get learn(1) working.

-Tom

More Version 7 UNIX

2. 2/14/2010 9:45 PM
Tom Manos photo

By Tom Manos

It's been a while since I posted here, but I have been progressing with V7.

Today I got a second 1GB disk running with a 200MB filesystem for /home. This is not the end of the disk discovery process, since I still have not figured out how to partition a drive to make multiple filesystems on it. I'm working on it!

I'm also considering setting up a serial printer. I've found a device that purports to convert serial to parallel protocol, so if it works, I should be able to use my Panasonic 24 pin dot matrix as a printer for this box. I can't wait to try it out, but the $50 I'll have to pay for the converter is a little much for me right now.

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