Hi all,

So I'm trying to run 1980's era UNIX in a Virtual Machine, whether it's simh or VirtualBox. It seems everything I find that is already packed into either has "invalid" (according to VBox) floppy images or has a broken link. Does anyone have a link to something?

I'm not particularly picky about which variant, more as to what I can just throw into a simulator/virtual machine easily.

Thanks!

Plan 9, if you can find it, maybe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs

Hardware has changed so much since then it would be wise to be prepared to resolve compatibility issues.

Note that most Unix's were copyright. That was the basis for the infamous SCO lawsuit.

Plan 9 is a bit newer - according to a quick Wikiepdia Google, it wasn't released until 1992.

I have the simh simulators, and can do just terminal in VirtualBox. Caldera released the source code for just tinkering (the notice they stitched with it asserts their "copyrights" over it). I'm mainly looking for vmdk or simh images that seem to be teased in broken links.

I fear it will be difficult to find a Unix that is available for legal download, as Unix is copyright. Plan 9 was the only one I ever ran into.

Depending on who you ask, Solaris is unix.

What is this that you have? ATT unix or what?

Pretty sure someone makes an emulator for some hardware. You'd have to know the hardware.

Thank you for all the replies so far.

I've gotten simulators for ATT Bell Labs PDP11 and ID16 machines for UNIX 5th-7th editions, and have found easy access to BSDs and the like going back to about 1990. I want to play around with UNIX from somewhere in between. I do know there are many different architectures and hardware I could simulate varying from PDP11 (with simh) to i386 (with VirtualBox), and that people built simulators. Every simulator I've found information on links me to an FTP server that was taken down.

I don't particularly care what hardware it's on or what flavor, I'm mainly wondering if anyone has working links to a an image ready for simh or VirtualBox of 1980's era UNIX. At this point I just something that's easy to set up an emulation of and start tinkering with.

Here you go. Have fun!

https://winworldpc.com/product/plan-9

EDIT: Here's System V too.

https://winworldpc.com/product/att-system-v-unix

WinWorldPC usually works for me, although for every download today they redirect me to their main page...???. But htat was a great pointer if I can ever get it do download on boonie DSL.

Any other sites? Thank you everyone for the links so far.

Downloaded them myself and am sharing from my cloud storage.

Plan 9
System V

Make sure the SHA1s match up:

Plan 9
System V

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System V, after getting some help from YouTube, is running beautifully in a Virtual Machine. Archaic computing can be quite fun - I have VMs of every version of SUSE going back to at least 7.0, and just found ISOs for 5.2-6.3, that'll be dangerous.

Good snow day project. Thanks!

Hi

I saw on usenet Coherent works in Oracle VirtualBox, see Google groups

that went from sometime in the 80's to around the mid 90's, there are diskettes available, do a google search

John

That looks like it'll be fun to play with one day. When I get around to playing with that too, I'll get back. Thanks!

Why?

Mac OS X is an officially blessed UNIX distribution. Unless you just want to tinker around with history, I don't see the point.

If you want to run System V, why don't just run Solaris?

I wanted like 1980's good ole days SystemV to tinker with. I've had that running for a while now