Some rights reserved! Vintage technology preserved.
| Previous | Index | Next |
|---|
I have never met AT&T Unix before, a plausible goal was installing it in when I accidentally found some install images at home. And everything was straightforward, however I applied some tricks I already known. No graphic content, but still no warranty - as usual! :-)
The extension of all images are ".DCF". Despite attached the corresponding conversion software for MS-DOS in the bundle, applied the usual trial-and-error method to "disassemble" the images:
$ unzip -l A.zip|sed -ne'1,8p;/U..\.DCF/{9s/.*/\n...\n/gp};34,$p'
Archive: A.zip
Length Date Time Name
--------- ---------- ----- ----
57530 1991-06-12 14:20 CCOPY.EXE
3037 1999-12-21 00:58 README.!!!
1474722 1992-01-28 20:33 U01.DCF
1474722 1992-01-28 20:33 U02.DCF
1474722 1992-01-28 20:33 U03.DCF
...
1474722 1992-01-28 22:44 U29.DCF
1474722 1992-01-28 22:44 U30.DCF
--------- -------
44302227 32 files
$
All floppy images are exactly 162 bytes longer than a usual 1.44MB 3.5" standard. So let's check them again if they have some common header:
$ for i in U{01..30}.DCF;do hexdump -Cn162 $i|tr -d '\n';echo;done|uniq -c|awk '$0=$1'
30
$
This means obviously that all image files have the same 162 length header. After hexviewed some of them, recognized the usual pattern: most disks are cpio/tar files truncated to/padded to 1.44MB except the boot disk (with system boot record, magicword 0AA55h, fs etc. The following perl oneliner did all conversions to raw format:
$ perl -i -0777 -pes/.{162}//s U*.DCF
$
The purpose of each image file are listed in the attached readme, so launched qemu-system-i386 in terminal with curses, fed all 10 images with necessary order - note that alt-2/alt-1 switches between qemu monitor and simulated vga screen instead of alt-Fn in graphic mode! There are several other reasons for choosing qemu particulary this OS: ne2000 ISA card support, curses, speed... spoiler alert: it worked as a charm ;-)
In qemu monitor management interface, floppy images can be attached with "change floppy0 IMAGENAME.FILE.IMG" command for example. Virtual floppy disk removal command: "eject floppy0", of course withOUT quotes in all cases! For the curious, tab completion does work in monitor interestingly - both for commands, permitted parameters or for filenames!
Created image: 1015 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors per track:
$ qemu-img create -f vmdk 10151663.vmdk 511560k
Full virtual machine commandline with an empty floppy drive:
$ qemu-system-i386 -nodefaults \
-hda 10151663.vmdk \
-drive if=floppy \
-m 32 \
-net nic,model=ne2k_isa \
-net user \
-monitor vc \
-serial vc \
-parallel vc \
-vga std \
-curses \
-no-reboot
The no-reboot switch is handy when some installation steps needs reboot - it is worth taking backups of harddisk images between two power cycles! Can use archives or snapshotting features - depending on disk image formats, host environment etc.
With this curses magic, grabbing text from guest to host using clipboard become easy - regardless support from guest side, so here is a merged dump of many simulated 80x25! VGA textmode dumps in linux host xterm:
total real memory = 33157120
total available memory = 31277056
AT&T UNIX System V/386 Release 4.0 Version 2.1
Copyright (c) 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990 AT&T
Copyright (c) 1987, 1988 Microsoft Corp.
All Rights Reserved
NOTICE: HD: interrupt with no request queued
Node: attsvr4
Setting up new kernel environment
The system is coming up. Please wait.
The system is ready.
Welcome to the AT&T 386 UNIX System
System name: attsvr4
Console Login: root
Password:
Your password has expired. Choose a new one
New password:
Re-enter new password:
UNIX System V/386 Release 4.0 Version 2.1
attsvr4
Copyright (C) 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990 AT&T
Copyright (C) 1987, 1988 Microsoft Corp.
All Rights Reserved
/ : Disk space: 438.89 MB of 453.43 MB available (96.79%).
/stand : Disk space: 4.56 MB of 5.41 MB available (84.27%).
Total Disk Space: 443.45 MB of 458.84 MB available (96.64%).
# uname -a
attsvr4 attsvr4 4.0 2.1 i386 386/AT
# bc -l
scale=66
a(1)*4
3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592304
quit
#
I found earlier some 3rd party (NE2000-compatible) DE-220 ISA network interface card drivers for Xenix386 (worked fine) and for AT&T Unix! The showstopper is the missing TCP/IP package, which is definiately an unobtaininum for (almost) all AT&T x86 Unix versions - TBD.
Have fun!
| Previous | Index | Next |
|---|