PDP-11 and Unix V7
We are planning to buy and restore a PDP-11/70 minicomputer and run Seventh Edition Unix on it.
This is a long term project. At present we have located a CPU and MMU board set and a field
print (700 pages of 11 by 17 drawings containing schematics, board layouts and assembly drawings).
PDP-11/70
The /70 was the last 'real' PDP-11 to be built, in that it's constructed from bare-bones TTL logic chips. Subsequent models either
used a bit-slice (MSI) architecture, or had one of the LSI single-chip -11 implementations. For anyone that has designed logic circuits
with 74xx series TTL chips, the 11/70 is the ultimate project: someone actually went out and build an entire @*#&# computer from TTL.
Amazing, and not soo good for the power consumption, but so much more pleasing than today's massive single-chip designs.
If you're sufficently curious, you can read the schematics for the 11/70, hook up a logic analyzer, and go see how it works.
Try that with a Pentium5.
As you can see from the picture below, we need to find a few more parts before our 11/70 will boot V7 Unix. At present it consists of 16 circuit boards
sitting on the office floor:
(UPDATE) We now have some additional parts: Two MASSBUS controllers, a boot/terminator card, a console card, a 16-port async line controller, an SMD disk controller, an FPU and a few 32k memory cards.
We are missing an MK-11 memory controller and backplanes. If you are willing to sell any of these items, or any other 11/70 hardware,
please contact us.
Unix V7
Unix V7 (officially known as 'Seventh Edition Unix') marked the beginning of the common
era for computing. Everything before V7 looks more or less strange and bizarre. Everything
after V7 looks pretty much the same as V7. V7 had the bourne shell. It had yacc. It had pretty much every familiar Unix command.
None of them has a binary larger than 128K! This is truely before 'code bloat' took hold in the industry. You could run V7 several times
over on my Palm Pilot.
In homage to the developers of V7 (who used 11/70 and 11/45 machines), and for fun and education, we plan to resurrect their OS on the original hardware.
PDP-11 and Unix V7 Resources
The PDP Unix Preservation Society
Old Unix versions archive sites
The vmsnet.pdp newsgroup
Senventh Edition Unix Documentation
PDP-11 Links at Village.org
©2004 Bozeman Pass Incorporated