[rescue] Looking for System V Release 4

[Tom Manos]

All,

Thanks for the replies. Since I only get the digest (and actually didn't get one today), I'll try to answer all the questions in one here...

All the things that I did early on in the public access UNIX world were done on PC hardware starting with Microport System V/AT, which as I recall was a SVR2. We moved on to SVR3 on 3/486 and then SVR4 on 486 & pentium. We did dialup early on with standard Hayes compatible modems running off AST 4 port 16550 cards. Remember those? We never had a Trailblazer, because in the early days we couldn't afford them. We were headquartered (and I am still) in Norfolk, VA. I still work with some of the original team that started the original UNIX dialup system in 1988. We pulled a full newsfeed via uucp from Old Dominion University and had a ball.

The system was originally called wyvern, and you can still find us by checking out the old uucp maps. Later, we became InfiNet and got to be a fairly large ISP with several hundred thousand subscribers in 120 cities with a couple hundred T1's and a T3. By that time we were using DEC Alpha servers (running DEC UNIX) and Sun Enterprise (running Solaris) equipment for web hosting. Dialup by the end was being done on Portmaster 3's and a few 4's before Lucent shut down the Posrmaster line. There was lots of other interesting equipment in between.

I want to resurrect the middle days of the early '90s with 486 hardware and SVR4. Yes there were many versions, but they were all very similar, and I would be happy to find any one of them. I would really prefer the full system with networking (3C509 and NE2000 cards were supported if I remember correctly), and especially the development system so I can build all or most of the old software that we used: Elm and Pine email clients, rn and vn (I think) newsreaders, C-News, gopher, WAIS, and a whole bunch of other stuff that I haven't thought about in many years but is slowly coming back to me. In many ways I think the net was much more fun before the web. You met a better class of people who were much less apt to abuse things.

So, I'd love to get something running, and I was only half kidding about starting a uucp network. Like Steven, I just want to do it for the fun of it, or "just because", and to remember how I got started in this business.

I also have a really nice AT&T 3B2/400 that I'm restoring to original. It has a pair of drives, 16 serial ports, scsi, and ethernet and runs SVR3.2

So anybody got a SVR4 (i386) cartridge they want to part with?

Cheers,
Tom