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WIth the 50th birthday of the UNIX operating system being in the news of late, there has been a bit of a spotlight shone upon its earliest origins. At the Living Computers museum in Seattle though they’ve gone well beyond a bit of historical inquiry though, because they’ve had UNIX (or should we in this context say unix instead?) version 0 running on a DEC PDP-7 minicomputer. This primordial version on the original hardware is all the more remarkable because unlike its younger siblings very few PDP-7s have survived.
The machine running UNIX version 0 belongs to [Fred Yearian], a former Boeing engineer who bought his machine from the company’s surplus channel at the end of the 1970s. He restored it to working order and it sat in his basement for decades, while the vintage computing world labored under the impression that including the museum’s existing machine only four had survived — of which only one worked. [Fred’s] unexpected appearance with a potentially working fifth machine, therefore, came as something of a surprise.
To load the OS a disk emulator was connected to the machine, and for possibly the first time in many decades a new UNIX version 0 device driver was written to enable it to be used. The first login was the user “dmr”, a homage to UNIX co-creator Dennis M. Ritchie.
With so few surviving machines it’s no surprise that we’ve not featured a PDP-7 before. You can, however, entertain yourself reading our coverage of UNIX at 50,
Via Hacker News.
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Fucking awsome. Thanx for this.
I got a copy from Bell Labs and ran it on a PDP 7. It is interesting to see the original commands still in the OS today.
I’d love to see a “front panel” version of the PDP-7 offered. I wish Digital had slapped a logo on there for show. It looks easy enough to make. Any chance of getting the measurements as well as what functionality was offered through the front panel?
I love Fred’s commitment to the pocket protector. Rocket on!!
Very cool. And also interesting to see the predecessor to C, the B language in action! Now to go down the rabbit hole and start looking at the PDP-7 emulators around.
And to think this is the great, great granddaddy of the iPhone… I don’t know weather that’s good or bad.
Wasn’t it Unics, back then, as a goofy play on Multics?
Yeah, you can even see it briefly in the video @1:28, where it’s handwritten on the punchcard.
Depends on who you talk to… If you calk to Ken Thompson, he’ll tell you he never called it that. Others did, but nobody wants to take credit for it… It’s not entirely clear that it ever was called unics, except that it makes a good story, so was repeated so much it became real…
Funny though, I have never realized that in the past the processor architecture used words that were a multiple of 3 because of the dominance of octal encoding for hand input commands and data.
Simply Beautiful. I so love the teletype console – want one now !!
Amazing restoration !
My first real system at College with a DEC-20 running TOPS-20 with rows for VT100s. If you got unlucky, you had to use the teletypes down at the end at maybe 9600 baud, more likely 300 baud if my memory is correct. Editing was a total pain on those system compared to the VT100s. Great keyboards!
Seeing this PDP-7 running makes me nostalgic… but not too much. And seeing the B language with that wierd limitation of only two characters per write() call is even funkier!
Two characters,
Is that in 7byte ASCII format too, I wonder? So 2-7byte characters. Interesting.