The emulator's page actually runs a Linux emulator first, which then you can use to call up the SimH project's PDP-11 emulator, passing it a boot.ini file containing bootstrap instructions. After booting into Unix v4 proper, you'll be greeted with a familiar prompt so you can log in as the "root" user.
As the old saying goes, though: beware, there be dragons here. You'd think that much like the kid in Jurassic Park , you could find your way around it because it's a Unix system, but there's no shortage of proverbial grues just waiting to eat you .
First off, you can forget about most of your commands or aliases to them. For starters, ll is short for ls -la, so you better get used to typing the whole thing. Likewise, chdir was the Old English form of cd . And while the usual cat can output files like you'd expect, editing them is a process, as there's no nano . Brother, hold on, as there ain't no vi either — you use ed and enjoy viewing files a few lines at a time and humbly requesting for substitutions (ex: s/one/two).
Additionally, as you'll quickly figure out, the navigation shortcuts like arrow keys simply do not exist. The screen was treated like a roll of paper, and in order to go back one character you have to erase it with the "#" character, with one of them meaning "go back one character".
If you want to kill the entire line, Ctrl+C won't save you, only typing "@" and hitting Enter will do. You can click this link if you want a deep technical dive on the vicissitudes of emulating PDP hardware and Unix.
The backend of emulation comes by way of the Linux-native SimH emulator that's running inside the almost-magical JSLinux emulator , with a barebones version of Alpine Linux. Incidentally, JSLinux can also get you going with FreeDOS and even Windows 2000. That ought to trigger more than a couple waves of nostalgia.
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Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals.
