The Rise of Unix. The Seeds of its Fall. / A Chronicle of the Unix Wars

It’s not mine, rather it’s Asianometry‘s. It’s a nice overview of the rise of Unix. I’d recommend checking it out, it’s pretty good. And of course, as I’m referenced!

The Rise of Unix. The Seeds of its Fall.

And part 2: A Chronicle of the Unix Wars

A Chronicle of the Unix Wars (youtube.com)

Years ago I had tried to make these old OS’s accessible to the masses with a simple windows installer where you could click & run these ancient artifacts. Say 4.2BSD.

Download BSD4.2-install-0.3.exe (Ancient UNIX/BSD emulation on Windows) (sourceforge.net)

Installing should be pretty straight forward, I just put the license as a click through and accept defaults.

Starting BSD via ‘RUN BSD42’ and the emulator will fire up, and being up a console program (Tera Term) giving you the console access. Windows will probably warn you that it requested network access. This will allow you to access the VAX over the network, including being able to telnet into the VAX via ‘Attach a PTY’ which will spawn another Tera Term, prompting you to login.

telnettting into the VAX

You can login as root, there is no password, and now you are up and running your virtual VAX with 4.2BSD!

All the items

I converted many of the old documents into PDF’s so you may want to start with the Beginners guide to Unix. I thought this was a great way to bring a complex system to the masses, but I’m not sure if I succeded.

776 downloads

As it sits now, since 2007 it’s had 776 downloads. I’d never really gotten any feedback so I’d hoped it got at least a few people launched into the bewildering world of ancient Unix. Of course I tried to make many more packages but I’d been unsure if any of them went anywhere. It’s why I found these videos so interesting as at least the image artifacts got used for something!

But in the off hand, maybe this can encourage some Unix curious into a larger world.

Other downloads in the same scope are:

Enjoy!

Peter’s Sun3 Zoo (restored)

Sometimes there is a great seemingly timeless resource on the internet, and you pull from it from time to time, make giant compilations, but never really reach out to the creator, or just archive the entire thing.

Then the unspeakable happens and it just up’s and disappears.

I never reached out to Peter Koch, to even thank him for preserving so much, or to apologise for not preserving his site, for some reason it felt like someone else would have done a better job. But then sometimes you find out you were that one person, and you didn’t do it, so you didn’t do it.

I don’t know the story, but it seems Peter did know that it was coming to and end.

May 01 2010 – Ending

Dear friends!

I have to give up my collection.

So if you’re interested in some pieces or know someone who might, please send me an e-mail.

Peter – Sun3 Zoo

So I’ll put in a call for help for the world at wide? Did anyone save anything more comprehensive than what was in archive.org, or what was in the ‘Titor Special‘?

In the meantime, the site has a new owner, and it’s been restored.

Peter’s Sun3 Zoo – sun3zoo.de

If anyone has any stories or anything preserved it’d be appreciated. There was at least a few parties, and party3, with party2 missing.

Thanks.

SimCity for Unix Liberated

(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)

In early 90s DUX Software ported SimCity classic UNIX. They provided downloadable demo versions for SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, OSF/1, Digital Unix, OpenDesktop, UnixWare, Linux and BSD.

SimCity SGI IRIX screenshot from DUX website

In the winter break wave of nostalgia I wanted to play SimCity on my vintage HPUX workstation. Unfortunately the 5 minute demo just wouldn’t cut it. Back in 1993 you could simply purchase a license key and unlock the demo to a full version. However even if I could find an old license code, these keys were “Host ID” locked, so you could not easily use it on a different machine anyway.

In 2008 SimCity Classic has been open sourced under a new name Micropolis for the OLPC project. This was truly epic endeavor, many thanks to everyone involved. Unfortunately for vintage computer enthusiasts, the source code been updated to compile on a modern Linux, before it was released to the public. It will no longer build on any old Unix system. Typically, when a developer decides to free up their obsolete version, they just toss out some licenses codes. Sadly this time no one ever bothered.

The only option left was to bypass the license checking code. Fortunately, modern binary analysis tools make patching old apps relatively straightforward. In just minutes I was able to get the game started in a full multiplayer mode. A few hours later I got it patched on all the vintage Unix platforms!

SimCity on Solaris 7 (also works on 8 and 9)
SimCity on HP-UX 9 (doesn’t work on 10 or 11 due to TCL/TK issues)
SimCity on OSF/1 aka Digital Unix aka Tru64
SimCity on IRIX 5.3 on MAME (doesn’t work on never IRIX due to COFF binary)
SimCity on SunOS 4.1.4 on QEMU
SimCity on SCO OpenServer / OpenDesktop (ODT)

UPDATE: patched IRIX as well! Special thanks to Mr^Burns for providing a preinstalled IRIX 5.3 MAME image!

UPDATE: patched SunOS version as well. Special thanks to Daghdha for preinstalled SunOS 4.1.4 QEMU image!

UPDATE: patched SCO Unix/ODT version as well.

You can download the demo versions and patches here. Happy gaming on your vintage Unix Workstation!

If you just want to try the game without bothering with an ancient unix, you can simply sudo apt install micropolis && micropolis on a modern Linux – it’s identical except for multiplayer

Unicos CD-ROM’s found!

Okay, so it’s old news. But it was news to me!

So over on Modular Circuits, Andras had posted a promising ‘UNICOS Update‘ which had detailed that 2 CD-ROM’s of Unicos had surfaced on archive.org cray-cd1 & cray-cd2. Along with posting the updated source to github, so I had no choice to replicate the experiment!

First the install is INSANELY slow. It requires you to setup a Linux (or unix) machine with rsh. Surprisingly there is a rsh-server package for Ubuntu 22.04. Basically it boils down to following the instructions. Although with WSLv2 I ended up making the bridge manually with:

brctl addbr craybr
ip tuntap add mode tap tap1
ifconfig tap1 up
brctl addif craybr tap1
ifconfig craybr 172.16.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0

It’s coded in the example configs to use tap1, but there you go. It’s a pretty straightfoward install but the decompression on the cray side takes the installation hours. As an experiment I changed the commands from rcp to remsh to gzip -dc the files locally on my PC, which had the benefit of of being much faster, and not taking up space.

I went ahead and uploaded both of my installs for anyone wanting to play OS tourist enough to check out UNICOS but not wanting to sit through the install.

The C compiler is.. ancient. and very touchy. You’ll need to add /usr/gen/bin to the path, and explicitly add the path for the linker like this:

/usr/gen/bin/cc zap.c -L/usr/gen/lib

Although the breakage is.. pretty epic. I had pretty much no luck bringing over any of my favorites. There should be a much better / modernish C compiler and Fortran compiler, although I’m not sure if it’s on these CD-ROM’s or I’m just massively ignorant of UNICOS, because I never got a chance to be anywhere near a legit supercomputer.

So yeah, pretty exciting stuff!

IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) aka Project Monterey runs again!

(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)

Project Monterey was an attempt to unify the fragmented Unix market of the 90s in to a single, cross vendor Unix OS that would run on the upcoming Intel Itanium (and others) CPU. The main collaborators were: IBM, who brought its AIX, SCO brought UnixWare, HP was supposed to bring parts of HP-UX and Sequent DYNIX/ptx. Ironically the project shared fate of the Itanium CPU—it totally failed. In the end Linux took spot of the “single Unix OS”. IBM donated AIX pieces to Linux instead and the main legacy of Project Monterey was the famous SCO vs IBM lawsuit.

IBM did however produce AIX version for the Itanium architecture! According to Wikipedia, some 30+ licenses were sold in 2001-2002. For years a dedicated group of individuals was trying to locate a copy of the legendary OS. It seemed that the OS was lost forever…

…until some 21 years later friends of NCommander checked in with a set of AIX5L IA64 CDROMS! The CDs have now been dumped and you can download them here. Unfortunately downloading will not get you much closer to actually running this. As of today no publicly available virtualization or emulation platform can boot this. Yes we tried Simics, looked at QEMU IA64 and XEN/KVM for IA64, etc. The OS will not boot on modern Itanium 2 (McKinley) CPUs, only the early “pre-release” Itanium 1 aka Merced. The only emulator allegedly capable of doing so was the super elusive unobtanium called Intel SoftSDV.

It’s currently speculated that AIX5L IA64 will work on and only on so called “Intel Software Development Vehicle (SDV)” sometimes referred to as “Intel Engineering Sample”. It was an Intel made machine, later sold in several OEM branded version: IBM IntelliStation Z Pro 6894, HP i2000 Workstation, SGI 750, Dell Precision Workstation 730 and Fujitsu-Siemens Celsius 880.

Intel Itanium Software Development Vehicle Lineup

…yes, they all look alike because all of them were in fact produced by Intel with custom case badges and paints.

Luckily I was able to score a working HP i2000. AIX booted up and installed on a first try:

AIX 5L IA64 on HP i2000 Workstation – boot loader
AIX 5L IA64 on HP i2000 Workstation – logged in

Initially I was not able to get the onboard NIC working. Upon short investigation AIX5L IA64 supports only two network cards:

adapter 23100020 IBM 10/100 Mbps Ethernet PCI Adapter (23100020)
adapter ae120200 10/100/1000 Base-T Ethernet PCI Adapter (ae120200)

The AIX Itanium Early Adopters Release Notes mentions a few other cards but I do not see drivers for these in the OS. The doc mentions “Extended Hardware Drivers CD” which we don’t have.

Luckily again I was able to find a working NIC on eBay!

The system comes with X11 and CDE but so far I was not able to get any GPU working beyond basic text mode. I tried many different video cards from that era but there simply doesn’t appear to be any driver in the OS except for basic VGA / LFT. I think the key to getting video working is the previously mentioned extended hardware drivers cd.

Finally, if you want to read more I have found some interesting pieces on ibmfiles and various mirrors here and here.

Update: Thanks to efforts of TRN we now have a working GCC and ports of lots of apps!

Update 2: After going through a pile of video cards I now have local X11 and CDE!

AIX IA64 local X11 with CDE

This was the lucky winner:

2,000 monthly downloads!

Well this is a bit ambiguous. As Im waking up to check emails I get this notice:

Congratulations! Ancient UNIX/BSD emulation on Windows has just been recognized with the following awards by SourceForge:

Community Choice
SourceForge Favorite

These honors are awarded only to select projects that have reached significant milestones in terms of downloads and user engagement from the SourceForge community.

This is a big achievement, as your project has qualified for these awards out of over 500,000 open source projects on SourceForge. SourceForge sees nearly 30 million users per month looking for, and developing, open source software. These award badges will now appear on your project page, and the award assets can be found in your project admin section.

-sourceforge email

So yeah, and here we are:

Nothing like standing on the backs of giants!

Naturally ready to run favorites include:

And of course for the DIY enthusiasts:

Honorable mention goes to the 4.3BSD UWISC enthusiast that downloaded Apache, AberMUD, and lynx!.

Undocumented Madness – 2.9BSD on XHomer

This is a guest post by Seal331

Since I’ve been dealing with XHomer a lot lately in order to get the two dumped VENIX/PRO versions to work, I noticed that the XHomer documentation mentions a thing called “maintenance mode” and the DEC Pro port of 2.9BSD, so I was interested.

After doing a bit of searching around I found some install notes on www.frijid.net from real hardware, so I decided to adapt these notes for XHomer and install it. TL;DR – I did it, here I’m explaining all this stuff.

Step 1 – Acquiring XHomer

XHomer is a DEC Pro 350 emulator that can run P/OS, Venix, 2.9BSD and possibly RT-11, but I didn’t get to installing the last one yet. There is a statically linked binary but, since I’m a Gentoo Linux person (but I didn’t use Gentoo for this particular install)and prefer compiling everything I can, I grabbed the source code (https://xhomer.isani.org/xhomer/xhomer-9-16-06.tgz) and quickly compiled it on my Linux box. It was pretty simple, just install a development toolchain (build-essential on Debian based systems), the libX11 development package (libx11-dev on Debian based systems) and the XShm extension which is included in libxext-dev on Debian based systems. During make it spit out a bunch of warnings but I got a working xhomer binary. Also it kind of messes the xterm settings a bit after being closed, so I’d recommend running it in a separate xterm window. Since there’s no install target in the Makefile I just copied the xhomer binary to /usr/bin, and that was it. From here on, I will assume that the XHomer binary is called xhomer and is somewhere in your PATH, if not just modify the way I run XHomer.

Step 2 – Acquiring the distribution

Thanks to the people at the same www.frijid.net site I mentioned earlier, I was able to easily piece together a distribution set. Since we don’t really rely on how many physical floppies we have with an emulator, I grabbed the recommended root disk set and the 15 disk usr set with the source code, although we won’t be compiling the kernel in this post. Maybe next one? We’ll see.

The site with the floppies is http://www.frijid.net/download/pro350/bsd/raw/ and here’s what I used for my install:

box#0/maintenance0.img
box#1/usr+k00.img
box#1/usr+k01.img
box#1/usr+k02.img
box#1/usr+k03.img
box#1/usr+k04.img
box#1/usr+k05.img
box#1/usr+k06.img
box#1/usr+k07.img
box#1/usr+k08.img
box#1/usr+k09.img
box#1/usr+k10.img
box#2/usr+k11.img
box#2/usr+k12.img
box#2/usr+k13.img
box#2/usr+k14.img
box#2/usr+k15.img
box#2/root1.img
box#2/root2.img
box#2/root3.img
box#2/root4.img
box#2/root5.img

The 3 disk usr set in box#2/ doesn’t include the source, so I didn’t grab it.
The maintenance disks are all the same, so I just grabbed the one in box#0/.
The 6 disk root set in box#0/ does include some extra dev files and something that appear to be leftovers from the development DEC Pro, but it’s missing /bin/ed and /bin/passwd, so I suggest using the 5 disk set instead.

There is also box#2/procomm.img which was labeled as containing “PRO/COMM terminal emulation” but when I mounted it to install, there was only an empty lost+found directory. Perhaps the original disk had gone bad over the years or someone accidentally reformatted it? We may never know.

Step 3 – XHomer configuration & serial port preparation

Since the maintenance (install) floppy uses a serial terminal interface over the printer port and XHomer only allows us to send its output over serial, I had to do some searching again since most PCs nowadays don’t have a serial port to use. Thanks to cantoni over at StackOverflow I managed to find instructions for using socat in order to generate a pty, which actually worked for me. At first you need to install socat (bruh) and then run “socat -d -d pty,raw,echo=0 pty,raw,echo=0”. Something like this will be printed out on the terminal:

Then we do a quick test. I use putty to connect to the pty’s output, in my case it’s /dev/pts/3. Just use the default settings for serial connection with speed 9600 and the device as /dev/pts/3. If everything goes well, you will get a blank putty terminal window. Don’t panic, the fact it’s blank is normal.

Let’s test if our serial port works. Echo something in the pty’s input, in my case it’s /dev/pts/4. For example, “echo “Test” > /dev/pts/4″. If the word “Test” appears on the screen, congratulations, you have successfully set up the pty to a point where BSD will happily talk to it when we set up the connection later. !! DO NOT CLOSE THE PUTTY WINDOW AT ANY POINT DURING THE INSTALL UNTIL WE NO LONGER NEED IT (at the initial hd boot) !!

Now we configure XHomer. At first, let’s make a disk image. BSD only supports RD51 or RD50, we’ll use RD51 as it’s slightly bigger. If you get the hard disk wrong, BSD will silently hang at boot. Here’s the command to make a 10MB RD51 disk image for use with XHomer:

dd if=/dev/zero of=29bsd.rd bs=10027008 count=1

Let’s make the XHomer config file. Note that everything after the symbol | including the symbol itself does not need to be inputed, it’s just my notes.

screen = window | make the emulator window mode
window_position = 0, 0
window_scale = 2
full_scale = 3
screen_gamma = 10
pcm = on
framebuffers = 0
serial0 = /dev/pts/4 | change to your needs, pty input
la50 = null
la50_dpi = 300
kb = lk201
ptr = serial0 | DO NOT CHANGE, we'll replace it later when we no longer need serial
com = null
rd_dir = ./
rx_dir = ./
rd0 = 29bsd.rd, 4, 306, 16 | change if not using suggested disk
force_year = 99 | fix y2k bugs by forcing year to 1999
maint_mode = on | DO NOT CHANGE, bsd install uses maintenance mode for terminal
int_throttle = off | random workarounds for clocks or older linux systems, we don't need this on new stuff
nine_workaround = off
libc_workaround = off
lp_workaround = off

Save the file as xhomer.cfg.

Now run the xhomer binary. If everything goes right, you should have something like this on your screen:

If you didn’t run the test documented above or changed the string, the “Test” string will not be in the terminal or will be some other text, this is all okay.

Step 4 – BSD install

In order to feed floppies to XHomer, you have to use the XHomer control menu. In order to get to it, press Ctrl+F1 when the emulator window has focus. The two floppy drives we need are rx0: and rx1:, these are equivalents of A: and B: in DOS. Insert the maintenance0.img disk in rx0. If all goes okay, the floppy disk picture should disappear from the display window, leaving just the DIGITAL logo. The putty window should then display something like this:

40Boot
:

(all following input is in the terminal unless otherwise stated)

If all is okay, congratulations, you have booted from the installation diskette. Now type the following in the putty window after the : symbol:

r5(0,0)rdfmt

Then, if you inserted an RD51 10MB disk in the emulator as suggested, type 0 when asked for drive type. If you inserted the 5MB RD50 instead, type 1. If you don’t know the exact disk sizes and types, refer to the XHomer documentation, specifically the Emulated Hard Disk part. The formatting shouldn’t take long, then it will dump you back in the 40Boot prompt. Now you need to boot the UNIX kernel, type this in the putty window:

r5(0,0)unix

If everything goes okay, you should have something like this now:

If you get a boot hang instead (like me), restart both XHomer and putty, connect putty back to the pty, then in XHome insert the maintenance0 floppy back and boot the UNIX kernel again. DO NOT FORMAT THE DRIVE AGAIN!!

Install time!

At first, create the root filesystem by running:

/etc/mkfs /dev/rrd0a 2240

Then insert the root1 disk in the 2nd floppy drive (rx1) and restore the root filesystem dump from the 5 root set floppies:

restor rf /dev/rr51 /dev/rrd0a

When it says “Last chance before scribbling on /dev/rrd0a.” just press Enter.
When it says “Mount volume N”, just insert the right floppy and press Enter. Volume number == floppy number in this case.

After the “end of tape” message, verify the rootfs:

/etc/fsck /dev/rrd0a

If it succeeds, create the usr filesystem by running:

/etc/mkfs /dev/rrd0c 6528

Then insert the usr+k00 disk in the 2nd floppy drive (rx1) and restore the usr filesystem dump from the 16 usr set floppies:

restor rf /dev/rr51 /dev/rrd0c

When it says “Last chance before scribbling on /dev/rrd0c.” just press Enter.
When it says “Mount volume N”, just insert the right floppy and press Enter. Floppy number == volume number – 1 in this case.

After the “end of tape” message, verify the usr fs:

/etc/fsck /dev/rrd0c

(all following input is in on the Pro display unless otherwise stated)

If everything is okay, run sync two times and shut down the emulator. Restart it with only the maintenance floppy in rx0, then type this in the terminal (NOT the Pro display):

rd(0,64)unix

This should boot up Berkeley UNIX (BSD). We’re not done yet, but it’s close.

Type the following to install the hard disk bootblock:

dd if=/rdboot of=/dev/rrd0h count=17

If everything goes okay, set the root password:

passwd root

Congratulations, you have successfully installed 2.9BSD. Here are the cleanup and hdboot prep stuff:

Bring the OS to single user mode:

shutdown +1

(you can close putty now)

Then run sync two times and shut down the emulator.

Step 5 – Booting the OS

In order to boot the OS, you need to do the following:

Open the xhomer.cfg file;

Remove the serial0 = line;

Change the ptr = serial0 line to ptr = null;

Change the maint_mode = on to maint_mode = off.

Then save, after running XHomer you should be able to just log in.

Congratulations, you have successfully installed 2.9BSD for the DEC Pro 350! Sadly it’s pretty unstable, and due to emulation issues in XHomer vi completely crashes BSD, but there’s always ed 😉

Appendix A – Transferring Files

In order to transfer the files (up to 400KB per file) you will need some additional utilities. Here’s a guide on how to install them:

(the following steps are done on the Linux host side)

  1. Grab the following files:

https://xhomer.isani.org/xhomer/BSD/f2rx
https://xhomer.isani.org/xhomer/BSD/rx2f.c
https://xhomer.isani.org/xhomer/BSD/lbn2xhomer.c

  1. Apply the following patch to lbn2xhomer.c:
--- lbn2xhomer.c   2015-07-05 07:51:19.000000000 +0300
+++ lbn2xhomer.c        2021-12-30 17:13:28.539768500 +0300
@@ -25,6 +25,7 @@

 #include <string.h>
 #include <stdio.h>
+#include <stdlib.h>

 #define SECSIZE                512
 #define SECTORS                10
@@ -66,7 +67,7 @@
   if (fptr_v == NULL)
   {
     printf("Unable to open %s\n", argv[1]);
-    exit();
+    exit(1);
   }

   fptr_x = fopen(argv[2], "w");
  1. Compile lbn2xhomer:
cc -o lbn2xhomer lbn2xhomer.c
  1. Set up f2rx for operation:
chmod +x f2rx
  1. Make a floppy image with the BSD side utility:
./f2rx rx2f.c
  1. Run XHomer and attach the generated rx2f.c.dsk to rx0

(the following steps are done on the BSD side)

  1. Grab the file from the floppy:
dd if=/dev/r50 of=rx2f.c skip=18 bs=1 count=891
  1. Compile the utility:
cc -o rx2f rx2f.c

You’re now ready to transfer files.

Short file transfer handbook:

  1. Run f2rx FILE on the host box, FILE being the file to use;
  2. Insert FILE.dsk into rx0 on XHomer;
  3. Run rx2f on the BSD side.

Appendix B – Init: no more children issue workaround

On some hosts, programs from the install floppy may randomly die with the “no more children” message. A workaround is to disable RTC mode and enable IOTRACE mode in the XHomer Makefile and recompile, leading to a much more slower (due to accurate timing) and working XHomer. After the installation, you can revert to normal settings and it should work, as the programs installed on the hard drive to not appear to suffer from the same issue.

Appendix C – Sequels

Possibly coming soon to VirtuallyFun:

Undocumented Madness 2 – Big hard drives on 2.9BSD XHomer
Undocumented Madness 3 – Custom Kernel on 2.9BSD XHomer

The Gould SEL Concept 32/87

Despite Gould’s location being a few minutes drive from where I first arrived in America, I never had any idea they existed, were making their own exciting machines, or were even a Unix VAR. At a time during the Unix wars one was left to choose SYSV or BSD, but Gould had gone another direction with UTX with a ‘why not both’ approach. Truly an 80’s miracle of Unix.

Well as luck has it there is a SIMH emulator! James C. Bevier has a project on github where he’s building his SEL32 emulation on SIMH!

Even better he’s included tape images, and working INI files which I was able to make into a working system! (after some help with a tape bug)

Boot
File is COFF format
-> section (.bss) size (177960) clearing at (0xcbc18)
-> section (.text) size (724800) loading at (0x1200)
-> section (.data) size (105176) loading at (0xb2140)

Start 0x1200

UTX/32 2.1B (exp) #0: Mon Apr 10 19:46:05 GMT 1989
    bsln@fenix:/usr.POWERNODE/src/src/sys/obj

V6 CPUIPU(P) configuration (IPU not present)
top of system = 0x400000
real mem = 8388608
End of kernel map 0x218464
avail memory = 7356416
using 256 buffers containing 262144 bytes of memory
using 256 mirror buffer headers
ioi: channel iop0 at 7e00 online
ioi: channel dc0 at 800 online
ioi: channel dc1 at c00 not present, dci cc=2
ioi: channel dc2 at 400 not present, dci cc=2
ioi: channel tc0 at 1000 online
ioi: channel en0 at e00 online
 -- CHECK AND RESET THE DATE!
swapping on the b partition
dmmax 512 mbswap 3576
dumplo 11776
Checking root filesystem
Check commented out, uncomment once you have edited /etc/fstab!
Automatic reboot in progress...
Mon Aug 30 05:35:46 CDT 2021
/etc/fsck -p /dev/rdk0d
/etc/fsck -p /dev/rdk0e
/etc/fsck -p /dev/rdk0f
File systems OK

Mon Aug 30 05:36:06 CDT 2021
Mounting file systems
/dev/dk0d mounted on /usr.POWERNODE
/dev/dk0e mounted on /home
/dev/dk0f mounted on /usr/local
Initializing loopback
Starting line printer daemon
Starting standard daemons: update cron.
Adding swap partitions
Standard setup functions
Invoke local rc file
Entering /etc/rc.local
dumpdirectory: No such file or directory
Starting Syslog Daemon
Starting local daemons: inetd.
Starting NFS/RPC daemons: portmap sund.
Mounting NFS filesystems
Leaving /etc/rc.local
Starting mail
Checking aliases file
Preserving editor files
Clearing /tmp - does not remove directories
Clearing pseudo terminals
Leaving rc
Mon Aug 30 05:36:07 CDT 2021


GOULD UTX/32 2.1B (noname) (console)

login:

It’s very BSD feeling on the boot and in the /usr directory there is 5bin 5lib

Sadly transferring stuff by just pasting on the console reveals that there is some IO issues in the simulator:

syncing disks... done

dumping to dev 101, offset 11776
ioi: channel dc0 at 800 online
dump succeeded

As a matter of fact doing anything too fast can/will panic the simulator. That goes for Ethernet and additional serial ports.

Interesting highlights of the platform:

Produced by hard-params version 4.1, CWI, Amsterdam
Compiler does not claim to be ANSI C

Char = 8 bits, signed
Short=16 int=32 long=32 float=32 double=64 bits
Char pointers = 32 bits
Int pointers = 32 bits

Alignments used for char=1 short=2 int=4 long=4
Character order:
    short: AB
    int:   ABCD
    long:  ABCD

Obvious issues with the platform is a lack of GCC. The PCC compiler while standard for early 80’s non PDP-11/VAX machines is a bit lacking as the years went on. I was unable to build gzip due to the following error:

# gmake
cc  -o gzip gzip.o zip.o deflate.o trees.o bits.o unzip.o inflate.o util.o crypt.o lzw.o unlzw.o unpack.o unlzh.o getopt.o
ld: warning: near subsegments too big for static base spanning
ld: gzip.o:
        no base for reloc of memref instruction at .nbtext+0x18 relative to symbol _progname
ld:
        1221 more 'no base ' errors
gmake: *** [gzip] Error 4

Sadly I don’t find much on Altavista other than this & this. It only offers this terse comment:

The constraints on address space on a Gould are quite severe.

Bummer. Additionally neither Hack 1.0/1.03 or PDP-11 Hack will build either. Surprisingly bash-1.14.7, make-3.75 and ircii-2.5 compiled. Obviously with no networking IRC is kind of pointless.

It’s an interesting time capsule of life outside of AT&T/CSRG or SUN, going in a different direction. It seems like a larger lost opportunity to take their ‘it runs both’ approach software and not have it available on different platforms. Granted for a hardware company once the software leaves the compelling reason to buy the hardware evaporates. Hello NeXT.

If anyone wants to try to re-create it, download and build the SEL32 emulator from github, and I put my vague instructions here.

Or for like minded OS tourists, you can give it a spin here: UTX32_2.1B.7z. I included a ‘9346-UTX-blank.disk’ file which is already prepared if you don’t want to go through the 15 questions to prep a disk. Likewise I made a ‘9346-UTX-biga-blank.disk’ image which is just a single large ‘a’ partition as it’s trivial to just add a bunch of big disks these days.

Full 32bit Unix machines from Ft Lauderdale! Who knew?

Cross compiling to AIX: or missing shr.o

I was inspired by NCommander’s MinGW to Solaris cross compiler so I thought I’d dig out the one that got me started decades ago, cross compiling to the RS/6000 from Linux some time back in 1993. For this experiment I was able to beg/borrow a copy of /usr/lib & /usr/include from AIX 3.2.5 and wanted to use that as a base. I decided to use GCC 2.7.2.2 and Binutils 2.11.2 as these were old enough t build somewhat easy enough from MinGW/MSYS 1, but I figured they also had the best luck of being able to parse the headers without needing ‘fixinc’.

I was able to build both binutils and GCC with this simple incanation

sh configure --target=ppc-ibm-aix325 --prefix=/aix3

One weird thing was that binutils completely sidestepped ld, so I had to configure that manually like this:

--target=powerpc-ibm-aix --prefix=/aix3

Also ‘eaixppc.c’ didn’t generate properly I had to rebuild binutils from Linux to get it to pick up and build that file, copy that back in to get a working cross linker. Older stuff has some issues with CR/LF from time to time, and sometimes it’s easier to deal with builds from other systems and pluck files as needed.

Surprisingly things built, and transferring the to my Qemu AIX image gave me this fun error:

exec(): 0509-036 Cannot load program /cdrom/demo/hello/hello because of the following errors:
0509-150 Dependent module libc.a(shr.o) could not be loaded.
0509-022 Cannot load module libc.a(shr.o).
0509-026 System error: A file or directory in the path name does not exist.

Surprisingly IBM has a fix!

# export LIBPATH=$LIBPATH:/usr/lib
# /cdrom/demo/hello/hello
hello world, compiled by GCC 2.7.2.2!
#

Amazing.

Of course it’s not all sunshine and rainbows, bigger programs like the ‘87 Infocom interpreter bomb like this:

C:\aix3\demo\infocom>gcc -v -o infocom file.o funcs.o infocom.o init.o input.o interp.o io.o jump.o object.o options.o page.o print.o property.o support.o variable.o term.o
gcc version 2.7.2.2
ld -T512 -H512 -btextro -bhalt:4 -bnodelcsect -o infocom /aix3/lib/crt0.o -L/aix3/lib file.o funcs.o infocom.o init.o input.o interp.o io.o jump.o object.o options.o page.o print.o property.o support.o variable.o term.o /aix3/lib/libgcc.a -lc /aix3/lib/libgcc.a
ld: section .data [0000000000000000 -> 00000000000007ff] overlaps section .text [0000000000000200 -> 0000000000009b0b]
ld: section .loader [0000000000000000 -> 00000000000014a8] overlaps section .text [0000000000000200 -> 0000000000009b0b]
gcc: Internal compiler error: program ld got fatal signal 1

Initially I thought this was a problem with the GCC Linker, but after copying the objects to Qemu, and linking from there, I found out that the GNAT gcc driver calls the linker in a different manner:

ld -bpT:0x10000000 -bpD:0x20000000 -btextro -bnodelcsect -o infocom /aix3/lib/crt0.o file.o funcs.o infocom.o init.o input.o interp.o io.o jump.o object.o options.o page.o print.o property.o support.o variable.o term.o /aix3/lib/libgcc.a /aix3/lib/libc.a /aix3/lib/libgcc.a

Reformatted for my cross, but this produces a running executable.

And finally phoon which heavily relies on floating point math:

C:\aix3\demo\phoon>ld -bpT:0x10000000 -bpD:0x20000000 -btextro -bnodelcsect -o phoon /aix3/lib/crt0.o phoon.o date_parse.o astro.o /aix3/lib/libc.a /aix3/lib/libgcc.a /aix3/lib/libm.a
/aix3/lib/libm.a(atan2.o)(.pr+0x308):atan2.c: undefined reference to __itrunc' /aix3/lib/libm.a(atan2.o)(.pr+0x33c):atan2.c: undefined reference to__itrunc'
/aix3/lib/libm.a(atan2.o)(.pr+0x3c4):atan2.c: undefined reference to `__itrunc'

I thought first I could just tack -lm onto the end. However remembering years ago, linkers ARE position dependent, and on AIX libm must come before libc.

C:\aix3\demo\phoon>make
ld -bpT:0x10000000 -bpD:0x20000000 -btextro -bnodelcsect -o phoon /aix3/lib/crt0.o phoon.o date_parse.o astro.o /aix3/lib/libm.a /aix3/lib/libgcc.a /aix3/lib/libc.a

And yep it runs!

Sadly networking is a bit goofed on 4.3.3, and Im unable to upload more than a few hundred bytes before a stall on the console so slip/ppp would be a bit useless.

Speaking of useless, if anyone is crazy enough, you can follow here: MinGW-AIX325.7z

Installing SCO Unix 4.2, part 3: LBA disks

This is a guest post by Friggigatto

In the previous post we managed to install a Compaq-branded version of SCO Open Desktop. One of the recommendations was to use a small hard drive and avoid LBA, since SCO Unix does not recognize it.

It turns out, however, that SLS UOD429A, the bootdisk + patch that we used in the first post of this series to install ODT, also adds LBA support (as found out on A.P. Lawrence’s excellent website).

Apart from enabling you to fully use larger disks (you can install on a disk larger than 2048 cylinders, as long as you set its size to 2048 cyls during installation; you are of course going to “waste” a lot of space), LBA is more convenient if you want to have a large root partition, since the root partition has to be entirely in the first 1024 cyls.

So of course I tried repeating the installation of the Compaq version by booting off UOD429A, inserting the N2 from SCO ODT, and… I quickly found out that it would not recognize the CD as a valid installation media. Annoying.

Eventually I found out that the N1 disk from Compaq has a ramdrive compressed in the kernel, from where the initial installation script is run, while the rest of the files (mostly installscript) are on the CD itself.

The fix was, in the end, relatively simple. All I needed to do was mounting the N2 floppy in the VM I had created before, copying “N2.Z” on my harddrive. I then uncompress-ed it, extracted it (it’s a regular tar file), and replaced the installation script with the one provided on Compaq’s CD. Then, the reverse process can be done: recreate the “N2” tar file, compress it, and copy it in the mounted N2 disk. If you don’t want to go through the same process again, you can download the patched disk.

The installation process is then simple: boot off UOD429A, insert the updated N2 disk when requested, and proceed with the rest of the installation as usual.

This way I managed to install SCO Unix on a TI TravelMate 6050, alongside DOS and Windows 95. It took a bit of trial and error (reading SCO technical support documents was, again, very helpful), but in the end this is more or less what I did:

  1. install Unix as LBA with a ~20mb DOS partition
  2. hide DOS partition & create a new one as primary active partition
  3. install Win95 on that
  4. install boot manager (I used Paragon’s Boot Magic) on first DOS partition (the hidden one)

Steps 1 and 2 were done in 86box, after creating a disk with the same cylinders, heads and sectors found in the BIOS of my TravelMate (using the LBA setting in the BIOS of both laptop and emulated machine, of course). After installing DOS and SCO Unix (I’m not sure anymore in which order), I copied the Win95 installation files on the new partition and finished the installation process on the laptop, after dd-ing the image to the CF card I’m using as hard drive.

After configuring Boot Magic (and creating a custom background and icon), now I’m greeted with this every time I boot up the laptop:

Since Windows 95 is installed in a FAT16 partition, I can mount it or access it via dosls/doscp inside SCO Unix too, which is convenient for sharing files (I tried installing a 3Com 3C589 PCMCIA card directly in Unix, since according to the docs it’s supported; unfortunately, the provided drivers only work with IBM PCMCIA controllers).

SCO Unix software

A large collection of ports for SCO Unix can be found at ftp.celestial.com, but it’s faster to use the ISO with all the ports I uploaded on archive.org.
To mount the CD with lowercase filenames, run #mount -rf HS /dev/cd0 /mnt

It’s worth noting that, before using the CD, we need to install it with mkdev cdrom (yes, even if we did install the whole system from a CD). In the process we will be asked whether we want a CD-ROM/TAPE device, which can be used to install more components for the system (CD-ROM/TAPE is the format used by the setup CD), and if we want to add to the kernel ISO9660 support, which of course we need. As usual, SCO documentation has a lot of information about this.

Gzip is included in the Celestial ports, but I also managed to compile an early version of bzip2 (here is the binary). If you compile it yourself use gcc, the code will be faster. The provided Makefile undefines __STDC__; gcc sets the flag and this creates problems at linking time, resulting in a call to a missing “__unlink” function.

Bonus content: recovery disks

In the process of getting more familiar with the installation process of SCO Unix, I realized I could benefit from having a set of spare bootdisks that would allow me to mount the hard drive and modify files at will (including after the first part of the installation process). So, I created them, using a ramdrive + compressed disk (similar to what SCO’s install process does, but also the boot floppy of Windows 98) to pack as many utilities as possible on a single disk.While I was at it, I did the same for Xenix 386.