• New software for old COHERENT

    From Udo Munk@21:1/5 to All on Tue Feb 12 12:08:44 2019
    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

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  • From Udo Munk@21:1/5 to All on Thu Feb 14 12:21:25 2019
    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

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