Last night i did something extremely geeky. I found myself a bootable image of Version 7 UNIX from 1979 and loaded it into SIMH, an emulator capable of among other things emulating a PDP-11.
SIMH is available in the Ubuntu repositories. It’s in one of the supplemental repos, multiverse or universe – I can’t remember. Installs easily. Getting the image running and understanding SIMH was a little tricky, but nothing you can’t figure out in half an hour or so provided you have some fairly advanced knowledge of computers. I managed to do it just fine with a little googling.
No, I don’t know why it says “1988″ in the screenshot.
The image isn’t completely ready. It boots in single-user mode and then you have to create a few directories that for some reason aren’t included. After that it’s bootable in multiuser-mode and runs just like on an actual PDP-11. Of course, text-mode UNIX isn’t exactly the most visually impressive operating system in the world, but it’s still quite neat.
Första tanken jag fick var att datumet berodde på milleniumbuggen (2000 = 1980 + 8 år), men sen kom ja på att det är 2009 nu o då faller min tes.
Jag hade nån teori om att maskinen som image-filen är klonad från hade det datumet satt. Eller nånting.