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The Heirloom Project

heirloom.sourceforge.net

60 pointsprotomyth19 comments

This, along with the software available at suckless.org, gives us but a glimpse of the elegance, leanness, minimalism and simplicity of the original UNIX. (Still, I am not sure what is the best way to have a UNIX experience today. One, more practical, probably would be to use a minimal install of Slackware; a more radical approach would be to play with Version 7 either on a PDP-11 emulator or using an existing port of the same to x86 available at http://emma.nfshost.com/v7x86/.)

Regarding "a UNIX experience today", I'd think some *BSD system maybe? I.e. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, or similar.

You could run Solaris[1]. They don't seem to provide versions older than 10.

[1] http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris10/d...

Elsewhere on the internet (without resorting to seedier places like torrent sites) you can find versions of SunOS 2.x/3.x/4.x as well as Solaris 1.x, 2.x, 7.x and 8.

A google search for "old unix emulator"[1] turns up a wealth of options.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=old%20unix%20emulator

Apple macOS Sierra 10.12

    Still, I am not sure what is the best way to have a UNIX experience today.

Write software. Get shit done. Repeat.

Running original UNIX on an emulator (or worse, firing up the old hardware) is as relevant to the experience of those days as Frontierland is to the late-nineteenth-century American West.

OpenBSD is the closest successor to classic UNIX.

This is a nice project to reimplement the GNU core utils with simpler/shorter code.

There's a couple projects that superceed it now though Rob Landley's Toybox and Suckless sbase/ubase.

* https://landley.net/toybox/

* http://git.suckless.org/sbase/tree/

* http://git.suckless.org/ubase/tree/

GNU core utils are more complicated reimplementations of the ancestors of these things.

mailx is a phantastic tool for scripting and automatic processing of mails and mailboxes.

Going from mail to mailx was a HUGE improvement back in the day.

Gunnar Ritter dropped off the internet half a decade ago. Nothing on that site is maintained. It's a shame; I hope people pick up the mantle.

Heirloom Doctools is maintained by Carsten Kunze at https://n-t-roff.github.io/heirloom/doctools.html.

I have the Heirloom Bourne Shell on all my boxes. I don't use it interactively, but I make an effort to restrict all my shell scripts to use nothing that is not in HBS and the Heirloom toolchest. It's a matter of pride to me that all my scripts be portable to virtually any *NIX system. I think it builds character and pride.

Why not build for POSIX sh, instead? It's more, umm, standard, and can be expected to run on any OS built in the past decade or more. It's equally character-building, if you've been accustomed to building for modern bash (at least, it was for me). I haven't seen an actual Bourne shell in maybe 20 years.

Posix is a great standard, but you need an implementation to actually run (and test) on. I've used dash for this as well, but heirloom sh should be pretty close (and at worst probably a subset and therefore safe).

Please do NOT use sourceforge.net

I didn't downvote you, but I'll ask the question...

Why not? The new (2016) owners BizX turned that ship around. They seem to actually give a shit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4n3e1s/the_state_...

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