19 Oct
2016
19 Oct
'16
8:54 a.m.
From: Dennis Boone
The sources for the V6 versions of the tmrk et al
programs seem to be
here:
Yes, I have those, thanks; those are the 1-block programs I mentioned to
Warren:
> The only V6 boot mechanisms are 1-block programs
that go into block 0
> of device 0 and which boot Unix directly from that file-system
Well, to be technical, also there are the programs to copy the disk images
from tape to disk - mcopy.s does that - etc. In case
anyone looks at mcopy.s
and wonders how R5 (which contains a pointer to the console
print/input
routines) gets set up, mboot.s, which will have run previously (to load the
appropriate disk-controller-specific version of mcopy off the tape) does that.
One can't actually boot V6 Unix directly from a V6 distribution tape, all one
can do is copy the disk images from the tape to the disk; one then boots from
the disk. (Although now that I look, there is tpboot.s, which claims to boot
from a file on a 'tp' format tape. But I
don't think V6 was ever distributed
in that form - and in any case, it would
still need a disk with a Unix file
system, with appropriate files - init, sh, etc - already on it, to be able to
boot Unix that way.)
Noel