From: Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2022 17:50:57 +1000
To: Angelo Papenhoff <aap@papnet.eu>
Message-ID-Hash: QJVSPPAZSG5HQWLUKRM7PPGTEKEJI7IF
CC: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: [TUHS] Re: forgotten versions
Archived-At: <https://www.tuhs.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/tuhs@tuhs.org/message/QJVSPPAZSG5HQWLUKRM7PPGTEKEJI7IF/>

The VAX Plan 9 kernel isn't worth anything. It never worked, was never
used, and was abandoned completely when better SMP machines started
appearing. The VAX code wasn't even ported, as I remember it; Ken and I
started over from scratch with a pair of 4-core SGI machines with MIPS CPUs
and wackadoo synchronization hardware.

-rob


On Sat, Jun 18, 2022 at 5:05 PM Angelo Papenhoff <aap@papnet.eu> wrote:

> To make people more aware of post-v7 Research UNIX it would be great if
> you could actually run all of them in a simulator and have the manuals
> available.
>
> V8 is working perfectly in simh and there's blit (jerq) emulation as well.
> DMD 5620 emulation should be possible as well with Seth Morabito's
> emulator, but as far as I understand it needs a different ROM that we
> don't have a dump of. (I've had a real 5620 connected to my laptop
> running v8 in simh, it worked perfectly)
>
> V9 exists as a port to Sun-3 and it can actually be booted apparently.
> The source seems incomplete, but the VAX kernel source seems to be
> included as well. Maybe it could be gotten to run in simh on a VAX
> in some form or another?
>
> V10 exists but not as anything that boots. I think getting this to work
> would be the holy grail but also requires quite a bit of effort.
> I don't know if the V8 and V10 file systems are compatible, but if that
> is the case one could probably start by bootstrapping from V8.
> It also includes the multilevel-secure IX system and software for the
> 630 MTG terminal.
>
>
> As for the manual...
>
> The V8 files have the man pages but not much of the documents.
>
> The V9 files seem to have neither.
>
> The V10 files have both the man pages and the documents but I have not
> yet tried to troff any of this.
>
> Since I know at least the V10 manual to be a work of art and beauty I
> think it should be available to everyone. I have not seen the physical
> V8 and V9 manuals, but if they look anything like the V10 one, they too
> deserve to be available to the public.
>
>
> Does anyone have a plan of attack? I'd gladly join some effort to make
> the research systems more visible or available again (but probably don't
> have the motivation to do so alone).
>
> Angelo/aap
>