Re: The history of the Linux OS

Simon Kenyon (simon@koala.ie)
Mon, 23 Nov 1998 16:32:07 -0000 (GMT)

On 23-Nov-98 Jim Gettys wrote:
> For example, no one will ever see UNIX before version 5, even though emulators
> exist for the hardware they ran on: Dennis Ritchie and others have been
> unable to find either a bootable disk image or sources to earlier versions.
> V5 and later versions can be played with today under emulators. (Would
> be easy to get the PDP-11 simulator running under Linux; I've suggested to
> Bob Supnik that it would be a good thing to do).

remember the paper in software p & e where some chap emulated the 11 using a dg
nova and fortran
ran v7 (or was it v6) a 3% of the speed of an 11/34
i remember asking dennis about it
his opinion was that it was quite a feat of engineering

i had a friend who did something similar
he had a 32v tape and was running vms
so he loaded the tape onto disk and wrote code to unpick the blocks and grabbed
the binaries for as and cc and would load them high and trap "change mode to
kernel" (i forget what the instruction is/was) and emulated the unix system calls
with bits for fortran

got the assembler, c compiler and sundry other stuff running

this was in 1979

--
simon


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