New Run Ancient Unix On Modern Hardware 2025

Easily run old versions of UNIX for PDP-11 on modern hardware

The contents of this repository allow older versions of UNIX (ancient UNIX) to run easily on modern Unix-like systems (Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, among others).

At this time, you can run the following versions of UNIX:

UNIX versions for PDP-11 (run on a PDP-11 simulator):

First of all, credits and acknowledgment for material available in this repository that is not my own (or has been modified by me based on previous work).

You will need the following tools and utilities to run the available UNIX versions:

First of all, you must have the PDP-11 Simulator (SIMH), qemu, GNU bash, Python, wget and git installed on your device. If you already have them installed, skip to section 2.

To install on Debian, Ubuntu, Pop!_OS and derivatives, use:

To install on FreeBSD, use (for FreeBSD, installing GNU bash is also required. This shell is not normally installed in a default installation. Installation of GNU bash is not required on Linux systems, where bash is already installed by default):

To install on NetBSD, use (for NetBSD, installing GNU bash is also required. This shell is not normally installed in a default installation. Installation of GNU bash is not required on Linux systems, where bash is already installed by default):

Source: HackerNews