
A project to resurrect Unix on the PDP-7 from a scan of original assembly code - fforflo
https://github.com/DoctorWkt/pdp7-unix
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salgernon
I wonder why "scanning" is required here; it seems to me like the effort to
set up and OCR this is greater than the effort of typing it in manually. Its
certainly not going to be worse (to an order of magnitude) than toggling the
boot loader of that era system anyway.

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xaduha
Yep. Split that into bite sized chunks and use something like Amazon
Mechanical Turk, as captcha or some other form of crowd-sourcing.

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rbanffy
For quite some time I've been toying with the idea of building CPLD/FPGA
recreations of pioneering computers like the Alto, the Lilith, the Symbolics
series, the Tektronix storage CRT machines and the PDP-[1~8]. I know people
have done it with MSXs and Apple II's, C-64's and even the Cray I, but it
would be lovely to be able to gift someone with a simple to use (I understand
operating a PDP-x is NOT simple) recreation of this cherished machines.

Of course, when appropriate, an as faithful as practical recreation of the
original keyboards (or front panels) should be made available.

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stormbrew
Surely this can't be arbitrarily re-licensed as GPL, or were these documents
re-licensed at some point?

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pm215
I think this would fall under the 'Ancient Unix' license that Caldera set up
many years back: [http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Caldera-
license.pdf](http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Caldera-license.pdf) (unless you want
to be picky about the definition of 'version 1' here).

Edit: I'm wrong, that specifically says pdp11, so the pdp7 code isn't covered.

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ghaff
I'd add that, given the subsequent court cases, it's unclear that Caldera even
owned the rights to offer that license.

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GnarfGnarf
The scans I looked at are almost illegible. The op codes can be deciphered
because there are only a limited number of legal combinations. The variable
names are another story.

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hackbinary
I wonder how many 'security' holes and exploits are in this original version
of Unix.

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sunahe
This repository is like the Jurassic Park. Hope they add enough safeguards to
prevent the PDP-7 invasion or something!

