Software archeology
It's not as glamorous as it sounds.
1972 Unix V2 "Beta" Resurrected
41–50 of 153 posts
Re: 1972 Unix V2 "Beta" Resurrected
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s the difference between an emulator and a simulator in this context?
In theory, an emulator is oriented around producing a result (this may mean making acceptable compromises), whereas a simulator is oriented around inspection of state (this usually means being exact). In practice the terms are often conflated.
Adding some anecdata, I feel like emulator is mainly used in the context of gaming, in which case they actually care a great deal about accurate reproduction (see: assembly bugs in N64 emulators that had to be reproduced in order to build TAS). I haven't seen it used much for old architectures; instead I'd call those virtual machines.
definitely agree on simulator though!
Re: 1972 Unix V2 "Beta" Resurrected
#43I love this! first time I see people use 'ed' for work!!! I wonder who else has to deal with ed also... recently I had to connect to an ancient system where vi was not available, I had to write my own editor, so whoever needs an editor for an ancient system, ping me (it is not too fancy). amazing work by the creators of this software and by the researchers, you have my full respect guys. those are the real engineers!
Never had to use ed but I remember working with someone a fair bit older than me that remembered using ed.
Re: 1972 Unix V2 "Beta" Resurrected
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Compiling an emulator is quite easy: have a look at simh. It's very portable and should just work out of the box. Once you've got that working, try installing a 2.11BSD distribution. It's well-documented and came after a lot of the churn in early Unix. After that, I've had great fun playing with RT-11, to the point that I've actually written some small apps on it.
The daves garage youtube has an episode where he documents the pitfalls of compiling 2bsd for a PDP-11/83. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBFeM-sa2YY basically it is an art on a memory constrained system. What I found entertaining was when he was explaining how to compile the kernel, I went Oh! that's where openbsd gets it from. it is still a very similar process.
What’s the process look like?
Re: 1972 Unix V2 "Beta" Resurrected
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
When gasoline was leaded, cigarette smoke was normal everywhere, and asbestos was used for everything you can think of? It is a fascinating decade but also quality of life likely has skyrocketed since.
> quality of life likely has skyrocketed since it hasn't
Depends on the specifics of your life.
As a gay man, I’m much happier in 2025.
Re: 1972 Unix V2 "Beta" Resurrected
#46Cool. Can we enter that time portal and live in that alternate reality?
I mean... Sure? Go buy an actual VT* unit ( maybe https://www.ebay.com/itm/176698465415?_skw=vt+terminal&itmme... ?), get the necessary adaptors to plug into a computer, and run simh on it running your choice of *nix. I recommend https://jstn.tumblr.com/post/8692501831 as a reference. Once you have it working, shove the host machine behind a desk or otherwise out of sight, and you can live like it's 1980.
Ha, I just bought a VT420 a couple of weeks ago. I just finished a hacked together converter for USB keyboards working well enough (in the last hour actually). Next job is to connect it up as a login terminal for my freebsd machine.
Re: 1972 Unix V2 "Beta" Resurrected
#47I once saw a talk from Brian Kernighan who made a joke about how in three weeks Ken Thompson wrote a text editor, the B compiler, and the skeleton for managing input/output files, which turned out to be UNIX. The joke was that nowadays we're a bit less efficient :-D
Re: 1972 Unix V2 "Beta" Resurrected
#48I once saw a talk from Brian Kernighan who made a joke about how in three weeks Ken Thompson wrote a text editor, the B compiler, and the skeleton for managing input/output files, which turned out to be UNIX. The joke was that nowadays we're a bit less efficient :-D
Otoh: I got react to run my tests without any warnings today.
Re: 1972 Unix V2 "Beta" Resurrected
#49I once saw a talk from Brian Kernighan who made a joke about how in three weeks Ken Thompson wrote a text editor, the B compiler, and the skeleton for managing input/output files, which turned out to be UNIX. The joke was that nowadays we're a bit less efficient :-D
The interview is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY6q5dv_B-o
One hour long, and Thompson tells a lot of entertaining stories. Kernighan does a good job of just letting Thompson speak.
Re: 1972 Unix V2 "Beta" Resurrected
#50I love this! first time I see people use 'ed' for work!!! I wonder who else has to deal with ed also... recently I had to connect to an ancient system where vi was not available, I had to write my own editor, so whoever needs an editor for an ancient system, ping me (it is not too fancy). amazing work by the creators of this software and by the researchers, you have my full respect guys. those are the real engineers!
Not ed, but definilty inspired by it, I am old enough to have done typewriting school exam on MS-DOS 3.3 edlin.
And since then never used it ever again, nor ed when a couple of years later we had Xenix access, as vi was much saner alternative.