On Mon, 2003-01-20 at 10:09, Richard Naylor wrote:
I should have mentioned its not small. The basic 2 disk machine is a 1.2m rack. I normally stack the 3rd disk and floppy on top, making a 5 foot rack.
But you will be able to run Unix on it if you can find a copy of the right software. This machine will run Bell Labs 6th and 7th edition quite happily. You should also be able to get BSD 2.9 to work on it if you can find sources for any of them. You are likely to need a tape drive to bootstrap the process unless you can find floppies with the sources on them. I also cut my programming teeth on machines like this. My first ever UNIX program was one which had to work out details of the byte architecture on this and other devices we were likely to run Unix on i.e. was the machine big or little endian, what was the order of the bytes in a short and in a long. I had never seen a C struct or union before but it was a good learning experience. I worked a research project which produced a software system that build a distributed Unix system called the Newcastle Connection. See http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/old/events/anniversaries/40th/webbook/distributed/sr... We ran 2 PDP 11/45 machines at Newcastle University (Serial nos 2006 and 2007) and three 11/23 machines running 7th Edition connected with 10 Mb/sec Cambridge Ring. We had to write our own comms system. See http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/old/research/trs/abstracts/193.html You will find many familiar programs on the 7th edition system - we used emacs and ed as our editors. This explains why I subscribe to the "you can't spell 'vile' without using 'vi'" camp and by that stage I was an emacs user. For those who describe 'emacs' as 'eight megs and constantly swapping' I can state this was not true in those days. We didn't have eight Megs of anything on the smaller systems - the has disc on the 11/23s was 5M and the Unix kernel had to be smaller than 56K in size. We didn't have vi until we had our first VAXes and BSD 4.2 I have a list of other programs but things like login, passwd, cat, dd, rm, ln (no -s option), mv, sh, ps, date, mount, mkfs, fsck, mail were all present. Even though there is an Ethernet interface TCP/IP networking may be more problematic. This machine and ones like it are important historically and should be preserved just as much as some of the other stuff held at Te Papa as they mark landmarks in our geek heritage! - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog