sanos home

Sanos PDP-11 Simulator with UNIX V7

Turn your PC into a PDP-11 running Seventh Edition UNIX. This way you can run UNIX just like Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson did back in 1979. This is a sanos port of Bob Supnik's PDP-11 simulator. I have made an ISO image with sanos, the PDP-11 simulator, and the UNIX V7 kit from The Computer History Simulation Project. Just put the CD-ROM in your PC and boot. Then your PC is turned into a PDP-11 running UNIX V7! This is great fun if you're a nostalgic UNIX geek.

If your want to try the UNIX V7 demo first download and unzip the ISO image. You can burn this image to a CD-ROM using your favorite CD-burner program and then boot the computer from the CD-ROM. You can also try it out using VMware by setting pdp11.iso as the ISO image for the CD-ROM device. You can get the source I have used to build the image here.

When you boot from the CD-ROM, sanos boots and starts the PDP-11 simulator. The simulator then boots UNIX V7 from the image.

At the boot prompt type: b

At the @ prompt type: boot<enter>

At the : prompt type: rl(0,0)rl2unix<enter>

At the # prompt type <ctrl-d>

Login as root with password root

KDF11B-BH ROM V0.9 512KB MEMORY 9 STEP MEMORY TEST STEP 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 TOTAL MEMORY ERRORS = 0 CLOCK ENABLED Type ? for HELP Enter one of [Boot, Diagnose, Help, List, Map]: b TRYING UNIT DL0 BOOTING FROM DL0 @ boot New boot, known devices are hp ht rk rl rp tm vt : rl(0,0)rl2unix mem = 177856 # Restricted rights: Use, duplication, or disclosures is subject to restrictions stated in your contract with Western Electric Company, Inc. Thu Sep 22 19:44:08 EDT 1988 login: root Password: #

Your UNIX V7 system is now up and running. You can use your ordinary UNIX commands like cat, ls, man, etc.

You can try to compile and run a simple C program: