pdp7-unix is a project to resurrect Unix on the PDP-7 from scans of the original assembly code done by Norman Wilson. The scans of PDP-7 Unix are in the Unix Archive at [http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/McIlroy_v0/] (http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/McIlroy_v0/) as the files 0*.pdf.
Update mid-March 2016: We've written an assembler, a user-mode simulator and commented several source files. We now have these utilities running: as, cat, chmod, chown, chrm, cp, date, ln, ls, mv, stat. We have a working shell with some functionality missing. We have a working filesystem and we can now boot the kernel, launch init, login, get to a shell prompt and run the utilities.
Things to do: finish the shell, write the missing utilities, bring the system fully up on a PDP-7 system, fix any bugs and document everything. We have a real PDP-7 and SimH as target platforms.
pdp7-unix requires Perl5 to build.
To compile it:
make pdp7
You will need simh 4.0 to run pdp7-unix. You can get the source code here.
On 64-bit systems, you may need to set the C compiler's optimisation level to -O1.
To run pdp-unix from the pdp7-unix source tree, do:
make run
Press ctl-e to break out the simulator into simh
You can also run pdp7-unix from precompiled binaries in the /binaries directory. There are orig binaries and alt binaries.
The orig binaries use the unixv0 directory semantics as restored from the printouts. To run pdp7-unix orig:
cd binaries/orig; pdp7 unixv0.simh
The alt binaries use the more familiar "." and ".." diretory semanatics as found in later unix. To run pdp7-unix alt:
cd binaries/alt; pdp7 unixv0.simh
A typical pdp7-unix session on simh looks like:
pdp7 unixv0.simh PDP-7 simulator V4.0-0 Beta git commit id: e153b7f2 CPU idle disabled 8192W, EAE RB: buffering file in memory PDP-7 simulator configuration CPU idle disabled CLK 60Hz, devno=00 PTR devno=01 PTP devno=02 TTI devno=03 TTO devno=04 LPT devno=65-66 DRM disabled RB devno=71 DT devno=75-76, 8 units login: ken password: ken @ ln dd ken . @ ls dd system hello . @ ls system dd ttyin keyboard pptin ttyout display pptout as cat chmod chown chrm cp date ds ed init ln ls mv password sh stat @ cat hello Hello, world @
The code in the original scans are (c) Novell who own the rights to the Unix source code. Everything that didn't come from the scanned files is GPLv3.
- /binaries holds pre-build boot and filesystem binaries for users who wish to run pdp7-unix without building it.
- /build is an area to build the kernel & filesystem and run them
- /man holds man pages
- /misc holds miscellaneous notes and information
- /scans holds the unmodified OCR versions of the scanned files
- /src/cmd holds the modified source code of the user-mode programs
- /src/sys holds the modified source code of the kernel
- /src/other holds PDP-7 source code which did not come from the scanned files
- /tools holds the source for the tools written to assist the project
pdp7-unix is under the GPLv3
We have a mailing list for those people actively involved in the restoration effort. Send e-mail to Warren Toomey (DoctorWkt) if you are keen to help out.
