henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (03/19/85)
Out of curiosity, I'm interested in locating the oldest Unix machine
that is still running Unix. U of T's original 11/45 is idle right now
but will be running Unix again shortly; this sets a "latest bound" on
the oldest machine, since our 45 appears to have been running Unix late
in 1974. This was one of the first 20 or so licensed Unixes outside Bell.
An older machine would have to be either inside Bell, or one of those
early few.
If the oldest machine turns out to be within Bell, I'm also interested
in the oldest non-Bell Unix machine.
Whatever machine is the oldest, it's not at the Murray Hill research
lab. I've already asked Dennis about this; nothing in his vicinity
is particularly old.
Since PDP-7 Unix can safely be assumed to be dead, the oldest Unix
machine will have to be an 11. Specifically, it will have to be a
45, a 40, or just possibly a 20, since our 45 pre-dates the official
announcement of the 70.
Please reply to me by mail; I will post the results.
--
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henryed@mtxinu.UUCP (Ed Gould) (03/26/85)
> Since PDP-7 Unix can safely be assumed to be dead, the oldest Unix > machine will have to be an 11. > -- > Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology Well, maybe not! DEC dragged a PDP-7 to its booth at UniForum in Dallas, and although they didn't get it running Unix for that show they were hot on the trail of a Unix tape for it. Maybe in Portland or Anaheim? (Are you interested in a machine that was running Unix in ancient times or an ancient machine running Unix? Clearly this is the latter.) -- Ed Gould mt Xinu, 739 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA 94710 USA {ucbvax,decvax}!mtxinu!ed +1 415 644 0146
henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (03/31/85)
There are indeed people within Dec who are making a serious effort to
get Unix V1 running on a PDP-7. But my specific interest is in things
that have been running Unix all along, not Unix newly brought up on a
machine that happens to be an antique. (Anyone for a 7094 Unix port?)
To give people a quick progress report on what I've found, the oldest
Unix machine is unquestionably within Bell. There are still some old
11s running derivatives of the assembler version of Unix, i.e. V3 or
earlier. Obviously they are running canned applications, not serving
as development environments. The oldest non-Bell Unix is less clear,
and I'm still getting information on this. Our old 11/45 has quite
definitely lost, by the way, since there were a handful of Unixes in
the field rather earlier (probably before official licensing started,
unless I've got the dates wrong).
--
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henryafb3@hou2d.UUCP (A.BALDWIN) (04/04/85)
While I was in research at the University of Vermont, a group involved with the Vermont Lung Center program project grant bought an 11/40. After much frustration attempting to use RSX-11M Ver. 2.0 (for those who know, multi-user on "M" in those days was a dream), the person responsible for the system was convienced to try the "new" OS from Bell Labs. As I recall, this was around late winter or spring of 1975. The UN*X was version 6 (but real early). The system consisted of: PDP-11/40 CPU with EIA and FIS (useless for UN*X!!). 32K core memory (DEC) 16K core memory (Plessey) Dual RK03 2.4 meg. disk drives 6 DL11-E single line interfaces Children's Museum's RK05 and DL11-E drivers That's right, a 48K machine. This machine ran like this until 1979 when it was upgraded to an 11/45 (64K) + RK06's. I inherited the system in 1978 (and promptly worked an upgrade). The 11/45 ran until the project folded in 1984. Throughout the entire time, the original V6 code was used (no upgrade to V7 due to the applications). What I found impressive was the fact that not one line of kernel code was modified during that time (only I/O driver code, RK06s, tty driver, etc.). Most all of the system failures were due to power fails (V6 didn't cope with that condition well), or hardware problems. In fact, it was not uncommon towards the end for the 11/45 system to run 3 or 4 months between reboots (and then only for PM). Al Baldwin AT&T-Bell Labs ...!ihnp4!hou2d!afb3 [These opinions are my own....Who else would want them!!!]