Ancient Unix

I had noticed Software Kits page. Create a directory for that, unzip the Unix V5 kit, and copy BIN/pdp11 into it. Finally, create "pdp11.ini" to contain: set cpu U18 attach rk0 unix_v5_rk.dsk boot rk0 Unix V5 is pretty raw stuff. The shell is primitive, no backspace handling, and certainly no command history. It annoyingly uses "chdir" rather than "cd". I fixed that by finding the source (/usr/source/s2/sh.c) and copying it to "mysh.c". I then did "ed mysh.c". Amazingly enough, I remembered enough "ed" to do what I wanted: # cp sh.c mysh.c # ed mysh.c 11135 /chdir/p if(equal(cp1, "chdir")) { s/chdir/cd/p if(equal(cp1, "cd")) { w 11132 q I then did "cc mysh.c;cp a.out /bin/mysh;/bin/mysh". I could now at least use "cd". But there's not much else you can do. There are no man pages, so the only way to figure out how commands work is to paw through the source. As most of the source is charmingly simple, that's not a great hardship, but you probably won't spend a great deal of time here without frustration (unless you are old enough to have used this and have a better memory than I). Exit the simulator with CTRL-E and "quit". I next downloaded the Unix V7 kit, which requires the "id32" emulator. My "id32.ini" file contains (as per iu7_readme.txt): set ttp ena set pas dev=12 att -e dp0 iu7_dp0.dsk att -e dp1 iu7_dp1.dsk boot dp0 Type "dsk(1,0)unix" at the Boot: prompt, do CTRL-D at the single-user prompt, and then login as "root" with password "root", and you have something a little more like a modern Unix system. No, I'm kidding. Yes, at least there are man pages (though they just spill out on the screen and there is no "more" to pipe them to). There is still not much else: it's still "ed" and this time the source for commands is not installed. If you are old enough to have used Tandy Model 16 Xenix, you'll see that this isn't all that far removed from that. The minimalist /etc/rc contains only 14 lines; it uses /etc/ttys and not inittab. My, we have come a long way, haven't we? *Originally published at