How can you relive those thrilling days of yesteryear? Can't help with the White House or the economy, but I can put you in the driver's seat of your own V7 Unix machine running on a simulated PDP-11.
First, get a copy of the SIMH simulator from Trailing Edge Technologies. Under "Software Kits to run on SIMH", grab the PDP-11 Unix V7 file. Extract the files to the same directory you loaded the simulators into.
Once you've got everything loaded, fire up the PDP-11 simulator and enter the following commands:
sim> set cpu u18
sim> set rl0 RL02
sim> at rl0 unix_v7_rl.dsk
sim> set rl1 RL02
sim> at rl1 unix_r1_diska.dsk
RL creating new file
Create bad block table on last track? [N]
sim> boot rl0
@boot
New Boot, known devices are hp ht rk rl rp rm vt
: rl(0,0)rl2unix
mem = 177856
#
And there you are! PDP-11 Unix V7 in single-user mode. Creating additional terminals and bringing the system up in multi-user mode is left as an exercise for the reader.
I realize this information is probably only interesting to old Unix geeks, but I wanted to put it out there because I had to do a lot of digging to find out how to make this work. I've used V[67] Unix, but I've never had to boot it, and I've certainly never had to configure a PDP-11 before. I figure a lot of people are in a similar situation, and hopefully this information will help someone.
Now, all I need to do is get VMS up and running on the simulated VAX and I'll be a happy camper! Although this emulator seems to emulate the speed of the old hardware as well, so I may not be terribly happy with the result...
