Resurrecting Ancient Operating Systems on Debian, Raspberry Pi, and Docker

John Goerzen has been buying old VT terminals and putting them to good use…

My plan with purchasing and setting up an old vt420 was to make it useful for modern software, and also to run some of these old systems under emulation.

To that end, I have released my vintage computing collection – both a script for setting up on a system, and a docker image. You can run Emacs and TECO on TOPS-20, zork and vi on 2BSD, even Unix versions 5, 6, and 7 on a PDP-11. And for something particularly rare, RDOS on a Data General Nova. I threw in some old software compiled for modern systems: Zork, Colossal Cave, and Gopher among them. The bsdgames collection and some others are included as well.

(Image from that web site)

via Hank G

I recently picked up a VT320 for a reasonable price and (hopefully) will have it hooked up soon. Your article on what you did for the VT420 was very helpful.

Ultimately, I think that I will hook it up to my RC2014 (since my Altair-Duino already has a TI Silent 700 for it).

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