New software for old COHERENT

[Udo Munk]

Now with a 3.2 development system that works for me I want to look into some
of the old software I never evaluated much.

In the early 80th I learned UNIX V7 on an unused PDP-11. The installation besides
the Bourne shell also had UC Berkeley csh. When reading the abstracts about the UNIX
shells I first liked the idea of a shell, that can be programmed with C syntax, at that
time I could program lots of stuff in C already. Of course I soon ran into problems
with the thing as everyone else, and continued to use the Bourne shell and later
the Korn shell.

Whatever, I know that quite some people wish to use a csh-ish shell, there have been
various ports of clones to COHERENT. Nowadays the old BSD und UNIX distributions
are open sourced with a permissive licence, I thought I have a look at the original from
that time.

So I ported UCB csh, Bill Joy, October 1978 to COHERENT 3.2. It was trivial because
this release of COHERENT is close to UNIX V7, which was used to write csh. While the
manual page formated ok under COHERENT, the document 'An introduction to the C
shell' by William Joy using roff MS macros did not work. So I just formatted the
document under UNIX V7x86 and included the readable formatted text for now.

Archive with sources and docs is here:
https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/ftp/new/3.2/

Enjoy,
Udo

[Udo Munk]

I brought z80pack release 1.6 up again on COHERENT 3.2, download is available here:

https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/ftp/new/3.2/

On a 16bit UNIX with 64KB text/data segments of course it is not possible to emulate
a 8bit CPU with 64KB memory. So on 3.2 the emulation must live with 32KB memory
for the Z80, but good enough to run CP/M 2.2 on such a VM. I left a bootable disk
in the archive, that was not possible in 1992, you had to have the CP/M kernel your
self.

The z80sim machine is compiled without disassembler to get the text segment into
64KB, so for looking at memory contents you only can dump.

Whatever, way back then I was using COHERENT 3.2 for debugging the Z80 opcodes
by running CP/M software on the emulation. Steve Ness even had to fix a compiler
bug for me to get the stuff working :) For release 1.7 I dumped the whole 16bit
support because such constrains weren't necessary anymore with a 32bit UNIX.

There are no instructions and the sources from that time are commented in german.
Unpack archive in your home or somewhere, cd z80pack-1.6/cpmsim and run
./cpmsim in this directory.

Have fun,
Udo