VTServer/etc for V6 Unix

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Wed Oct 19 21:08:13 CDT 2016


    > From: Warren Toomey

    > This doc: .. describes a way to install from tape, but it seems like it
    > does a block copy of a tape image to the disk.

Yup, that's the standard V6 install from tape. It uses the two programs I
mentioned in the last message; first mboot (which produces the '=' prompt),
and then mcopy (assembled with the appropriate disk and tape drivers), which
is used to copy disk images to the disk.


    > Also .. there is a v6.tape.gz file. Unfortunately, I have no
    > documentation on this. It could be raw blocks, or it could be a TAP
    > file, who knows.

I looked into this previously. The other three files:

  root.v6.tar.gz
  doc.v6.tar.gz
  usr.v6.tar.gz

are just TAR dumps of the 3 disk images on the V6 distribution tape: the root
(includes kernel source, and most of the binaries), usr (source for all
commands), and documentation.

The v6.tape seems to be an image of V6 distribution tape. Here are some
notes I made a while back, when I looked at it:

  The first 100 512-byte tape blocks contain the tape bootstrap stuff. Blocks
  100 - 4099 are the RK05 root image, blocks 4100 - 8099 are the /usr RK05
  image, and the blocks 8100 - 12099 are the /doc RK05 image. .. The most
  recent timestamp on any file in /usr and /doc is July 19th 1975, as with
  Dennis' copy. However, the most recent file timestamp on root is October
  11th, 1975

  Block 0 on tape - mboot (tm tape booter)
  Block 1 on tape - hboot (ht tape booter)

  Block 2-xx - gubbish, apparently inodes, code, etc?

  Block 98 on tape - hpuboot
  Block 99 on tape - rpuboot
  Block 100 on tape - rkuboot

HTH.

	Noel


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