Like the old guy in the model T

ronaldlees

ronaldlees

I feel like the old guy in the model T on parade day. I'm sitting here typing this comment, using an old Netscape version on FreeBSD 3.3 What better to do on a Saturday when the entire family is elsewhere? I started with FreeBSD 2.2 from the archive, but it complained that it couldn't deal with more than 64 MB of memory. Ah - the days! X11 is running in 1024 resolution, and Navigator looks as kludgy as it always did, but hey - it's pretty darn speedy!
 
patch

Now I've found a patch for the FreeBSD-2.2 problem at:

http://www.cs.unc.edu/~jeffay/dirt/FAQ/bounce.html

Should I give it a go? I mean, some people are still running old PDP "machines" in emulators. They probably used a "home alone" Saturday (or many of them) to do that! Here's a quote from Henry Block's "Hacker's Delight" :

"Though the PDP-10 has not been manufactured for many years,there remains a thriving cult of enthusiasts who keep old PDP-10 hardware running and run PDP-10 software using ... " (emulators)
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The 3.3 ports are so clean. Many of the ports are self contained packages. Netscape required nothing outside of base X11, png, tiff, and jpeg. Excepting for the original base installation disk media, only seven packages were required to install both WindowMaker and Netscape, doing it in about a minute and a half. The packages are TINY! That is sooo much different than today's versions ...
 
Cool project. I have never run a FreeBSD this old. Is it still pretty familiar?

I would love to see some screenshots of some of the old programs that recent operating systems are unable to sustain.

Netscape is a cool one. Can you get Gnome 1?
 
57 Chevy

kpedersen said:
Cool project. I have never run a FreeBSD this old. Is it still pretty familiar?

I would love to see some screenshots of some of the old programs that recent operating systems are unable to sustain.

Netscape is a cool one. Can you get Gnome 1?
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Actually, a quick glance, or short usage, wouldn't betray the fact that I'm using FreeBSD 3.3. I did find that after losing power, the automatic fsck on reboot took FOREVER. The "model T" designation really should be reserved for version 1.0. The archive pins version 1.0 at November, 1993, version 2.0 at June, 1995, and version 3.3 at November 1999. So, maybe 2.0 is the "57 Chevy" and 3.3 is the "61 Ford".

BTW: wblock - thanks for the link. Methinks that could be another Saturday "home alone" project.

A few minutes ago, I launched the Mosaic browser. As usual, it wasn't much good for anything outside of nostalgia. It thinks everything is a binary it wants to download. :)
 
Drivers

Gnome 1.0.53 is in the FreeBSD-3.4 repository. For some reason, the version 3.3 repository directory is missing. I'm using Windowmaker at the moment.

I noticed a big jump in the number of available drivers from FreeBSD-2.2 and FreeBSD-3.0 to FreeBSD 3.3. I looked in my junk drawer to see if I could find an old network interface card to match something in the 2.2 hardware list. Lo and behold, I found an old SMC-Elite-16 in the bottom of the drawer. What luck! FreeBSD 2.2 doesn't seem to have any driver for the Realtek NIC that's in the machine I'm running at the moment (with FreeBSD-3.3). Maybe I can get the Elite to work with FreeBSD-2.2.

It helps that I'm a hardware packrat, I guess :)
 
Vanishing point - going backwards

So, I could'nt get signs of life from the old Elite 16, prompting me to believe that it was in the junk drawer for a reason. But - I found a nice old 3Com, circa 1997.

Instead of patching the earlier FreeBSD 2.2, I downloaded the last of the 2.2 series (2.2.9). It has the "memory over 64M" problem fixed. Then, I noticed the old 3Com was an ISA card, and I had only PCI slots in the FreeBSD 3.3 machine. Instead of going to the junk drawer, I went to the junk closet. Voila - I found a 1993 PC with the old bus slots in plentiful bounty!

I plugged in the old card, created a boot floppy (on another machine) - and booted into FreeBSD 2.2! Using that other machine, I downloaded the CD installation media, plugged that into the old '93 CD drive, and installed the OS. I rebooted, fetched lynx, and now, I'm entering this forum message using FreeBSD 2.2

Thrills. Anyway, I couldn't wait until next Saturday, being on a little roll ...

One thing about the OS is that the code base is very small. I've been poking around in the src directory. Really, for someone wanting to learn all about FreeBSD at the kernel and primitive user level, this may be a really good thing to do (I'm rationalizing all the effort that brings eye rolls from the family).
 
Remember that we are right at the 20-year anniversary of the FreeBSD-1.0 release, so this is timely.
 
You know I would love to know if there are any 1.0 boxes running in the wild (wouldn't surprise me that much), or if we could run a "What's the oldest bit of hardware you're running BSD on" competition.
 
Vanishing point - impact

You know I would love to know if there are any 1.0 boxes running in the wild (wouldn't surprise me that much), or if we could run a "What's the oldest bit of hardware you're running BSD on" competition. -Saxon3049
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Maybe we could add a sort of AntiqueOS enthusiast forum ... with associated hardware, of course. Count me in! All that stuff should be gone (from current use, perhaps) but not forgotten!

Anyway, let me get back to my current antique project. On the old '93 box, FreeBSD 2.2 was surprisingly useful. After a little fiddling with XF86Setup (which seemed to require more fiddling than usual, for some reason) I finally got X11 running on FreeBSD 2.2, and took some time to tool around the net using Netscape Navigator 4.5, fetched from the repository. Version 2.2 seemed not much different than 3.3, IMO.

Looking at the desktop, one wouldn't notice the difference. Even punching around on the command line, doing simple things, gives no hint of vintage.
 
ftp-archive - great stuff

The FreeBSD archive is awesome. I don't think even the Debian archives allow a person to fetch Debian version 1.0 (could be wrong there).
 
Fsck woes

At some point I had to do an fsck. Fsck printed the message:

Must update to modern format using a version of
fsck from before 2002 with the command fsck -c 2.
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I wonder what changes were made (and what were the associated dates) to the UFS/UFS2/FFS filesystem, through the years?
 
The problem with old hardware, especially floppies, is that it is now antique and likely to fail. And failure of floppies from the images was pretty common, even when floppies were still around. That's why I was setting up a VM image. Easy to limit memory, limit the CPU to an older model if needed, hard drive less than 1G or even 512M, and so on.
 
wblock@ said:
The problem with old hardware, especially floppies, is that it is now antique and likely to fail. And failure of floppies from the images was pretty common, even when floppies were still around. That's why I was setting up a VM image. Easy to limit memory, limit the CPU to an older model if needed, hard drive less than 1G or even 512M, and so on.
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Yes - most people could have at best only a VM to run on anniversary day. (Hey there's a promo idea - but there isn't much time to come up with a working VM image). It helps to be an old hardware junkie, to work with these old systems. I'm not really a hardware junkie, I just never throw any of it away. :)

Maybe - we could have an event where every participant logged into this forum on Nov 14'th, using an an early version of FreeBSD!
 
VM on wonkity

That was why I started working on it back in June: http://wonkity.com/~wblock/freebsd-1.0/freebsd1.txt. It would be great if somebody would finish that up. -wBlock
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I took a quick look at your build sheet on wonkity. Got the gist of what you're doing, but haven't thought much about it yet. You're right about the antique hardware thing, as that would cause the installation to elude most people, so building a VM is an excellent idea. I had been thinking about alternate ways to boot 2.2 on Saturday, to dispense with the floppies. Messing around in the afternoon, I managed to boot the FreeBSD-2.2 kernel on a USB stick!

That sounds great, until you realize that versions 1 and 2 have zero usb support. The kernel boots OK, if you use a recent FreeBSD system (like 9.1) to init the USB stick, with fdisk -BI /dev/da0 and then bsdlabel -B -w da0s1 and then newfs -U -L FBSD /dev/da0s1a and then mount the stick, and run the FreeBSD-2.2 bin distribution's install.sh script, with the stick as the destination.

After building such a stick, and then putting it into a machine, I could see that it boots the 2.2 kernel fine, but the kernel couldn't do anything, because it wasn't USB aware. If we were to put USB stuff into 2.2, it wouldn't be 2.2 anymore - so it would defeat the purpose. Monkeying with the installer is OK, and so long as we don't touch the kernel, we're "legit".

So, a bootable CD, or a VM seems like the best way to go ...
 
As I type

Maybe. Try it! - wblock
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I'm setting up a VirtualBox environment on a FreeBSD 9.1 machine as I type this :)

I've never been a big VirtualBox fan. The performance hit was always a little annoying for me.I have used it to test a few things I didn't have matching "real hardware" to use properly - like Solaris. We'll see how it goes ...
 
Down the Rabbit Hole

ronaldlees said:
I'm setting up a VirtualBox environment on a FreeBSD 9.1 machine as I type this :)

I've never been a big VirtualBox fan. The performance hit was always a little annoying for me.I have used it to test a few things I didn't have matching "real hardware" to use properly - like Solaris. We'll see how it goes ...
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Well, I need to remember now, did I say something about it's being "EASY?"

It turns out that, by default, VirtualBox does not recognize 5.25/1.2MB floppy diskette images. Thanks to a very nice web site (with the word "museum" in the domain name) - I was able to enable 5.25/1.2MB floppies for the virtual machine that I set up in VirtualBox. First, the site URL is:

http://www.os2museum.com/wp/?p=465

The command is:

VBoxManage setextradata "{473f80ae-88c1-406c-8f23-e70edee0ad0}" VBoxInternal/Devices/i82078/0/LUN#0/Config/Type "Floppy 1.20"

The UUID in the command happens to be the one created for my virtual machine. After a machine has been created, its UUID can be found within the .VirtualBox directory and in the appropriate virtual machine's XML file.

Before the VBoxManage command can be issued, one must configure a floppy controller in the "Storage" section of the virtual machine's setup page.

Unfortunately, there is no data setting that will backtrack the virtual IDE controller for the virtual hard drive. That's the rub.

Seems like we've waded far enough into the morass to say "We'll get to the other side, eventually, if the gators don't get us first" :)
 
PIIX3 is the oldest disk controller available in VirtualBox. That may be another reason to use QEMU. Also, QEMU can pretend the processor is a 486 or Pentium, if needed.
 
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