For old-timers: Questions about AT&T UNIX System V Release 4 Version 2.1, which I have installed in an emulator.

[Patrick McCandless]

I have recently installed AT&T System V/386 in Bochs. The base OS
successfully installed and I can log in as root.

My questions are:

There are supplementary floppies including things like remote login,
networking tools, and other applications. I cannot for the life of me
figure out how to install them, however. They are not bootable, and all
attempts to mount the floppy drive using what I know from Linux have
failed (as have attempted google searches on this hoary old OS). I see:

# mount
/ on /dev/root read/write/setuid on Fri Sep 21 12:35:27 2012
/proc on /proc read/write on Fri Sep 21 12:35:27 2012
/dev/fd on /dev/fd read/write on Fri Sep 21 12:35:28 2012
/stand on /dev/dsk/0s10 read/write on Fri Sep 21 12:35:29 2012

"/dev/fd on /dev/fd" has me a bit wigged out. Presuming that is the
floppy drive, it is not accessible as a normal mounted drive via that link.

Looking in /dev, I see:

# ls -al | grep fd
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 416 Sep 21 21:46 fd
brw-rw-rw- 3 root sys 1, 0 Mar 18 1991 fd0
brw-rw-rw- 3 root sys 1, 1 Mar 18 1991 fd1
crw-rw-rw- 3 root sys 1, 0 Mar 18 1991 rfd0
crw-rw-rw- 3 root sys 1, 1 Mar 18 1991 rfd1

So if I attempt to mount this to mountpoint /floppy:

# mount /dev/fd0 /floppy
mount: /dev/fd0 no such device
# mount /dev/fd /floppy
mount: /dev/fd not a block device
# mount /dev/fd1 /floppy
mount: /dev/fd1 no such device
# mount /dev/rfd0 /floppy
mount: /dev/rfd0 not a block device
# mount /dev/rfd1 /floppy
mount: /dev/rfd1 not a block device

This presumes I am even approaching this from the right direction. When
installing the OS, I was prompted to create three separate accounts:

root
install
service

I am not sure what these other two accounts are used for but I wonder if
that install account (which has a password assigned) is involved in
installing these additional utilities.

NOTE: I installed the OS itself from floppies, so it does have the
ability to read them.

What I'd *really like* is a pointer to documentation on this OS.

Does anyone remember / can anyone help?

And since someone is bound to ask: "Why are you installing a 20+ year
old version of proprietary UNIX?" -- Curiosity. I want to see how much
I can make it do and I am interested in the differences between it and
Linux/modern xBSDs. For fun.

Thanks.

[Doug McIntyre]

Patrick McCandless <flai...@gmail.com> writes:
>I have recently installed AT&T System V/386 in Bochs. The base OS
>successfully installed and I can log in as root.

Is this straight up AT&T? Or some other companies rebranded stuff?
At the time, there were many licensees, and they usually did lots of
customization for it. Ie. at the time, AT&T didn't really ship a 386 box,
but was still on their 3B2. You may find more info on SysV for the 3B2
than for a 386 box.

You are reaching the area I term the computer documentation gray-zone,
where computer knowledge isn't old enough for archival/memory dump
purposes yet, but yet very little is actually online, still being
mostly presented in paper books. The FAQs have rotated offline, the
how_I_used_to_do_this have rotated offline. The paper documentation
set being the most useful, but nobody has scanned them in yet.

>There are supplementary floppies including things like remote login,
>networking tools, and other applications. I cannot for the life of me
>figure out how to install them, however. They are not bootable, and all
>attempts to mount the floppy drive using what I know from Linux have
>failed (as have attempted google searches on this hoary old OS). I see:

Could they be SysV packages in datastream format? ie..

pkgadd -d /dev/fd/0

If you dump things off the disks, do they look like ##DaTaStReAm##?

>So if I attempt to mount this to mountpoint /floppy:

># mount /dev/fd0 /floppy
>mount: /dev/fd0 no such device

Could be because there isn't any valid filesystem on that media. They
weren't big on error reporting and clueing you in back in those days.

>I am not sure what these other two accounts are used for but I wonder if
>that install account (which has a password assigned) is involved in
>installing these additional utilities.

root can still do anything. The others give a restricted permision for
field techs to be able to login onsite and do their work.

>What I'd *really like* is a pointer to documentation on this OS.

Your best bet online is solaris 2.x documentation. Although Sun took
SysV in really different directions for many items with Solaris, they
did do a lot of the initial work with AT&T to develop SysV, and there
are many areas here and there that match up.

Otherwise,
http://www.alibris.com/booksearch?keyword=system+v+release+4&mtype=B&hs.x=0&hs.y=0&hs=Submit

>And since someone is bound to ask: "Why are you installing a 20+ year
>old version of proprietary UNIX?" -- Curiosity. I want to see how much
>I can make it do and I am interested in the differences between it and
>Linux/modern xBSDs. For fun.

Also, you need to know that AT&T SysVr4 is different than SCOs
version, is different than Dell's version, is different from
Commodore's version, is different than Consensys's version, is
different than Apple's version, etc. etc.

If you get real stuck, you probably can ask around at www.tuhs.org,
although they typically like older Unix's than that.

[Patrick McCandless]

Argh, think I e-mailed you by mistake; meant to reply (new Usenet
client). At any rate:

> On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 03:04:03PM -0700, Patrick McCandless wrote:
>> So now I'm thinking Microsoft is the important part here...
>
> No not at all. They developed Xenix. They got their fingers into the
> pot to put their bits in so they'd have an interest in Unix. If you
> read the source code (which at this time, about all we can get is
> Solaris source code from the period they opened it), you'll find
> Microsoft copyright all over the place, even though they provided
> little).

Ah. Well, regardless, I did find some documentation to an old release
by a different company which got me down the road aways.

As you suggested, this was how I wound up installing those extra
packages from the floppies:

pkgadd -d diskette1

"diskette1" is some syntax....

> Floppy disks were rare for Unix systems. 386 Unix was a bit of a
> solution looking for a problem. No unix person then would use a 386
> system for their unix setup. Xenix had probably the biggest market
> share for 386 even through SysV days (it was based on much earlier
> unix systems). Tape was where it was at for unix then and ongoing for
> some time.

This one boots from floppies but then queries whether or not the rest of
the install will be via tape or floppies.

I guess I had hoped to see some sign of TCP/IP on the networking disk,
but no such luck. According to Wikipedia, this was the release that
brought it in, but I guess it wasn't included with this specific
distribution. Probably somewhere out there rotting on some old hard
drive or tape are TCP/IP packages which you perhaps purchased separately.

Fortunately the Editor package brought in an old copy of vi.

It's something, at least.