4 Jun
2009
4 Jun
'09
2:26 p.m.
On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 9:52 AM, Dan Gahlinger <dgahling at hotmail.com> wrote:
why would you ruin a perfectly good PDP with something as awful as BSD?
what's the point?
Because you can explore the roots of UNIX?
is there any advantage to ruining such wonderful
hardware rather than running
BSD say on an old 286 or something?
Only because UNIX sprung from the PDP-11 and didn't spring from an Intel box.
If I wanted to use a 286 for something other than DOS, I'd probably
run Minix. I don't know if there ever was a proper "BSD" ported or
back-ported to the 286 (Venix, Xenix, etc., are evolutionary
backwaters and therefore uninteresting to me).
it completely loses it's uniqueness, no special
software, never seeing those wonderful command lines
unique look and feel, everything that makes the machine special.
I love RT-11 (having made my living on it 20+ years ago) and a variety
of proprietary DEC operating systems, so I understand the sentiment,
but even back in the day, we ran 4BSD and SysV and Ultrix-32 on our
11/750 as well as VMS. More than a few universities ran 2BSD on their
PDP-11/70s, not RSX-11M+ or RSTS/E. The history of DEC is
intertwined with the history of UNIX, especially at academic sites.
might as well run a vanilla BSD box, no one would know
the difference.
except some of the commands that show what it's running on, but big whoop there.
so is there something special you can do that shows it's uniqueness?
Living with the 16-bitness of the processor? 4BSD on a VAX was at one
point, "the pinnacle" of the UNIX experience ("All the world's a
VAX"). Massive address space, no need for overlays, etc. 2BSD is
more representative of what people went through before 1978, with
enough similarity to a modern environment that you can dabble without
getting lost (older UNIX is missing lots of stuff that most of us take
for granted anymore).
I've also done some work exploring how the C compiler works by
compiling programs on a PDP-11 platform, then disassembling them to
see what C constructs map to what PDP-11 instructions (and I found the
exercise quite enlightening).
All of this can be easily done with a simulator like simh (and I've
done it, more than 10 years ago), but it still doesn't compare to
running on real hardware.
So that's why _I_ would run BSD on a PDP-11.
-ethan