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1972 Unix V2 "Beta" Resurrected

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Re: 1972 Unix V2 "Beta" Resurrected

#4

Spock levels of fascinating from me. I want to learn how to compile a pdp11 emulator on my mac.

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.

Re: 1972 Unix V2 "Beta" Resurrected

#6
I 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!

Re: 1972 Unix V2 "Beta" Resurrected

#8
post #4

Spock levels of fascinating from me. I want to learn how to compile a pdp11 emulator on my mac.

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.

From the link:

> It's somewhat picky about the environment. So far, aap's PDP-11/20 emulator (https://github.com/aap/pdp11) is the only one capable of booting the kernel. SIMH and Ersatz-11 both hang before reaching the login prompt. This makes installation from the s1/s2 tapes difficult, as aap's emulator does not support the TC11. The intended installation process involves booting from s1 and restoring files from s2.

Re: 1972 Unix V2 "Beta" Resurrected

#9
post #4

Earlier 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.

From the link: > It's somewhat picky about the environment. So far, aap's PDP-11/20 emulator ( https://github.com/aap/pdp11 ) is the only one capable of booting the kernel. SIMH and Ersatz-11 both hang before reaching the login prompt. This makes installation from the s1/s2 tapes difficult, as aap's emulator does not support the TC11. The intended installation process involves booting from s1 and restoring files from…

good luck though. my emulator is not particularly user friendly, as in, it has no user interface. i recommend simh (although perhaps not for this thing in particular).

Re: 1972 Unix V2 "Beta" Resurrected

#10
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://opensimh.org/ Works great on Apple Silicon

What’s the difference between an emulator and a simulator in this context?

There is LOADS of gray area, overlap, and room for one's own philosophical interpretation... But typically simulators attempt to reproduce the details of how a particular machine worked for academic or engineering purposes, while emulators are concerned mainly with only getting the desired output. (Everything else being an implementation detail.)

E.g. since the MAME project considers itself living documentation of arcade hardware, it would be more properly classified as a simulator. While the goal of most other video game emulators is just to play the games.

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