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Author Topic: PDP-7 Unix resurrected!  (Read 3201 times)

Offline PDP-8

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PDP-7 Unix resurrected!
« on: February 15, 2018, 02:17:28 AM »
Congratulations to Warren Toomey (of TUHS fame) and crew for finishing up their PDP-7 Unix restoration project! :

https://github.com/DoctorWkt/pdp7-unix

Warren has written up restoration projects before, but this one is the infamous bridge between Multics and Unix proper, written in assembly on an obsolete machine at the time.  Without giving too much away, tools had to be written, such as modifying the simulator since nobody has a PDP-7 in their garage, writing an assembler to handle the code which was found in a jar in the desert. :)

If you search the recent TUHS mailing list archives, you'll find the link to his paper describing the final success of the PDP-7 Unix restoration project in more detail.

Afficionados of stuff like this, will dig even deeper into Multics, CTSS, ITS, Project Mac, Genie, Lisp Machines, MIT, UCB, BTSS (there was a LOT going on at Berkeley well before BSD!), Xerox Parc, and all the people, ideas, and mega-machines behind it all!

To me, TinyCore reflects much of this same less-is-more wisdom, even though we may have an over-abundance of memory and speedy hardware to play with.
« Last Edit: February 15, 2018, 02:28:01 AM by PDP-8 »
That's a UNIX book! - cool  -- Garth