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1972 Unix V2 "Beta" Resurrected

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414 points henry_flower | 2 comments | 19 Feb 25 21:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.541s | source
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digitalsushi ◴[19 Feb 25 22:35 UTC] No.43108644[source]▶
Spock levels of fascinating from me. I want to learn how to compile a pdp11 emulator on my mac.
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thequux ◴[19 Feb 25 22:45 UTC] No.43108732[source]▶
Compiling an emulator is quite easy: have a look at simh. It's very portable and should just work out of the box.

Once you've got that working, try installing a 2.11BSD distribution. It's well-documented and came after a lot of the churn in early Unix. After that, I've had great fun playing with RT-11, to the point that I've actually written some small apps on it.

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somat ◴[20 Feb 25 01:17 UTC] No.43109967[source]▶
The daves garage youtube has an episode where he documents the pitfalls of compiling 2bsd for a PDP-11/83. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBFeM-sa2YY basically it is an art on a memory constrained system.

What I found entertaining was when he was explaining how to compile the kernel, I went Oh! that's where openbsd gets it from. it is still a very similar process.

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1. azinman2 ◴[20 Feb 25 06:21 UTC] No.43111709[source]▶
What’s the process look like?
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2. somat ◴[20 Feb 25 18:43 UTC] No.43118430[source]▶
On openbsd it's

    cd /sys/arch/$(machine)/conf
    cp GENERIC CUSTOM
    vi CUSTOM    # make your changes
    config CUSTOM
    cd ../compile/CUSTOM
    make
https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq5.html

I have never done it for 2bsd but according to http://www.vaxman.de/publications/bsd211_inst.pdf

    cd /usr/src/sys/conf
    cp GENERIC CUSTOM
    vi CUSTOM
    ./config CUSTOM
    cd /sys/CUSTOM
    make