Any PDP-7 Expertise?

[Ian S. King]

On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 7:54 PM, Warren Toomey <wkt at tuhs.org> wrote:

> Hi all. Some of you may know me as the guy who set up the Unix Heritage
> Society at www.tuhs.org. We've been able to restore some of the old Unix
> systems to working order, including a PDP-11/20 version from 1972.
>
> I've just been given a scan of the assembly listing for PDP-7 Unix
> which includes the kernel and some user-mode programs. The scans are
> at http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/McIlroy_v0/
> as the files 0*.pdf.
>
> I have this crazy idea that this system could be resurrected to working
> order on SimH and/or on a real PDP-7. But I'd a) need to learn the PDP-7
> architecture, b) write an assembler, c) OCR the scan (manually) and
> d) spend a lot of time debugging something that has no user manual and
> may not even work!
>
> I thought I'd ask here if there is any PDP-7 expertise that I could lean
> on if I decided to actually proceed.
>
> Many thanks in advance for pointers, suggestions, help.
>         Warren
>
> P.S I've already found http://www.soemtron.org/pdp7.html
> the PDP-7 Reference Manual f75ppdp7prelimumdec64.pdf and
> http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/pdp7/`
>

I did some work with the running PDP-7 at LCM, and Warren let me know this
data was available.  Unfortunately I have some other commitments right now,
but I'll get there... I'm very excited about this.  -- Ian

-- 
Ian S. King, MSIS, MSCS, Ph.D. Candidate
The Information School <http://ischool.uw.edu>
Dissertation: "Why the Conversation Mattered: Constructing a Sociotechnical
Narrative Through a Design Lens

Archivist, Voices From the Rwanda Tribunal <http://tribunalvoices.org>
Value Sensitive Design Research Lab <http://vsdesign.org>

University of Washington

There is an old Vulcan saying: "Only Nixon could go to China."