In search of 2.11BSD, as originally released

https://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2020/07/211bsd-original-tapes-recreation.html

by fanf2 • 6 years ago

194 33 6 years ago

bsdimp.blogspot.com

irl_zebra• 6 years ago

I love these great, though utterly useless, projects people do for the love of things and for no other reason than it’s something interesting to them. I will be following along.

maxmcd• 6 years ago

History is not useless

retrac• 6 years ago

Far from useless. Often educational.

bsdimp5• 6 years ago

It's my COVID-19 insomnia project...

TedDoesntTalk• 6 years ago

What year/month was this version released? It’s not in the article.

MarxOk• 6 years ago

It's surprising how often "utterly useless" project turn into huge companies. I for one will keep pursuing them :D

pmarin• 6 years ago

I always find weird to read this kind of comment in a forum with "hacker" in the title.

nix23• 6 years ago

Yes this!! Its normal to read comments like that in linkedIn but not on HN...same as why use 9front/*BSD/Haiku/Inferno? Just take a normal Linux Distribution.

alekq• 6 years ago

It is great encouragement that time investment is never lost if it is something you love and enjoy, even when no one else has benefit of it.

breput4• 6 years ago

2.11BSD is still getting patches[1] - mostly due to renewed interest from the PiDP-11 project[2]. Recent changes[3] include the addition of the 'top' utility.

Reverting to patch level zero is an interesting exercise but there are still plenty of people who are interested in maintaining and updating the operating system.

Edit: And I understand the pain - the "patches" are a eclectic mix of straight diff output, shell archives, uuencoded compressed tar files, and all sorts of manual steps. But the patch "readme" information is unusually verbose and the update instructions are well written and informative.

[1] https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/2.11BSD/Patch...

[2] https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11

[3] https://github.com/chasecovello/211bsd-pidp11

microcolonel• 6 years ago

Turn 'em into git commits.

I've done this with a lot of things which only have changelogs and tarballs, it is convenient.

breput4• 6 years ago

To do that, you'd really need the entire 2.11BSD distribution in source control. So the real problem would be that you'd need to start with...patch...level...zero. :whoa:

Seriously, that would be a beautiful thing from a historic standpoint. But there is no git client for 2.11BSD, so you'd also end up having to build a git->something (probably shell archive and b64 compressed tar) that could allow the 2.11BSD system to update itself (and we're talking a 16/22 bit system here). There are also changes that require kernel recompiles and/or reboots so it turns out to be an extremely difficult problem. Which is why there are these human readable patches.

jsjohnst• 6 years ago

I’d lay a bet I know of some 2.11BSD boxes still running critical production code at a former employer.

progman324• 6 years ago

Reminds me of this recent video on recovering Luminary 69, Apollo 10's lunar module code (the only known copy of which is somewhere in solar orbit) by careful reconstruction of the development process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JTa1RQxU04

This exploitation of side-channels is something to pay attention to. Data is rarely fully lost!

taejo• 6 years ago

In that case someone found a listing of the checksums of the code that launched in the archives (!), that could be used to verify the reconstruction. I wonder if there's anything like that for 2.11BSD

chungy• 6 years ago

This reminds me of a thing in the Doom community to restore a "lost" release of DOSDOOM: https://github.com/Doom-Utils/historic-ports/commit/ce8bbd69...

ChuckMcM• 6 years ago

For some reason I thought this was on the PUPS disc?

bsdimp5• 6 years ago

No. 2.11BSDpl195 is the earliest one available. It's what was on the old PUPS disk... PUPS became TUHS (http://www.tuhs.org) and this is the oldest one there and none of the old timers that ran 2BSD in PDP11 have the original tapes.

DNied2• 6 years ago

It could be an interesting website, but I really don't feel like scrolling horizontally all the time to read the text.

fireattack• 6 years ago

scrolling horizontally

What do you mean? The text renders fine here on both desktop and mobile (no need to scroll horizontally).

raldi• 6 years ago

What if you make your browser window narrower?

In search of 2.11BSD, as originally released

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