Help needed for Unix anniversary in 2019

[Warren Toomey]

Hi all, some of you may know me as the guy who runs the Unix Heritage
Society and the archive of old Unix systems:
https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tuhs,
http://www.tuhs.org and http://www.tuhs.org/Archive

Mid-year 2019 is the 50th anniversary of the creation of Unix and I've
been quietly agitating for something to be done to celebrate this. Up to
now, there's been little response.

The original Unix user's group, Usenix, will hold its Annual Technical
Conference on the west coast of the US at this time, so it would make sense
to do something in conjunction with this conference. Some suggestions:

- a terminal room with a bunch of period terminals: ASR-33s, -37s, VT100s,
  VT102s, VT220s
- these connected to emulated Unix systems either locally or via a terminal
  server and telnet to remotely emulated systems
- some graphical terminals: Sun pizza boxes, a Blit would be great
- if possible, some actual real PDP-11s, VAXen
- emulated systems: V1 to V7 Unix, 32V, the BSDs etc. In fact there are
  plenty of Unix versions that we could run in emulated mode.

- Unix of course was one of the systems used to implement the Arpanet
  protcols, so it would be interesting to get some of the real/emulated
  systems networked together
- how about an emulated UUCP network with Usenet on top of it, and
  some mail/news clients on the emulated systems.

- retro workshops/tutorials: how to edit with ed, using nroff, posting
  a Usenet article, dealing with bang paths.

I'm proposing to gather a bunch of people to start the ball rolling on the
technical/demonstration side. We'd need people:
- with terminals, portable PDP-11s and VAXen, Sun boxen
- prepared to set up emulated systems
- who can help bring the networking (UUCP, Usenet, Arpanet) back to life
- willing to write and run workshops that show off this old technology
- to help set up terminal servers and all the RS-232 to telnet stuff

Some of this we can start doing now, e.g. rebuild an emulated Arpanet, UUCP,
Usenet, get emulated systems up, build front-end telnet interfaces.

Is there anybody willing to sign up for this? I think once we have some
momentum, we can tell the Usenix people and get some buy-in from them.

Post back and/or e-mail me if you can help. Thanks, Warren