Party like it's 1972!

Dick Nixon's in the White House, inflation's threatening to go double-digit, and you've got a deadline on that payroll-processing code. You head to the office, sit down at your VT-100 (no more VT-52, w00t!) and log in to the development PDP-11. In a few seconds you're staring at the familiar command prompt of V7 Unix...

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...