A Peek at History The MCC Interim Release & QEMU The DEC PDP-11 & SIMH

MCC Interim Release What, When, Why? Current state of the archives. Bootable copy.

MCC Interim Release - What? First 'independently installable' Linux distribution. Manchester Computing Centre. 'Extended release' on a number of floppies. A range of utilities, e.g. flex, bison, perl, emacs, elisp, gcc, vi. Regarded by author, Owen, as 'unofficial experiment'.

MCC Interim Release - When? Version 0.12+ released February 1992. Release 1.0 April 1994 Release 2.0 23/09/1996 – with X!

MCC Interim Release – Why(then) ? For 'non UNIX experts' Ease of installation. Self contained Easy to extend 'Free', as in speech.

MCC Interim Release – Why(now) ? Historical interest, 'restoration' 'conservation'. See and play with a very early Linux system. Manageable for study purposes; easy access to source code; still 'compact'.

Current State of MCC IR archives ftp://ftp.mcc.ac.uk/pub/linux/mcc-interim/ Archives exist under 'old' for kernel versions 0.97 to 1.2+ The latest version is for a 2.0+ kernel 1.0, 1.2+ are still definitely bootable. QEMU images on MANLUG website, under the history section.

QEMU PC Emulator http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu Runs on a variety of architectures (x86, PowerPC and SPARC are best). GPL/LGPL Comprehensive documentation Quick Demo of MCC IR under QEMU

SIMH Project The Computer History Simulation Project http://simh.trailing-edge.com/ Built by Bob Supnik, ex DEC engineer. Simulators for 30-odd machines. Comprehensive documentation and collection of papers. Packaged for a number of modern Linux distros. Latest version 3.7-0 (has 'set throttle').

DEC PDP-11/45 June 1972 Price c.$45,000 (Roughly $200,000 @ 2006 prices) 256Kb max memory 16-bit word Clock speed ?kHz 0.76 mips Took a team of skilled engineers to unpack and set up. SIMH Demo of v5 UNIX 0.76