UniPlus UNIX: oops...

...as in, "oops, I wish I'd found this group sooner."

I was a grad student in Virginia Tech's CS department in 1985, when they required all incoming CS freshmen to buy Lisas running the UniPlus UNIX system. I wanted one badly enough not only to get in on the student deal, but to pay something like $300 extra for the FLOPPY distribution of UniPlus.

Fast-forward 23 years, and in the wake of recent $3500-4000 closing prices, I decided to list my Lisa on eBay. AFTER starting the auction, I found my UniPlus disks. All sixteen of them. "Sure", I thought, "those disks will be PERFECTLY readable after twenty-three years, the last eleven spent in a non-climate-controlled garage."

Well, I tried running the installation last night (to a ProFile whose MacWorks installation had gotten corrupted), and the first part of it appeared to work. I got no read errors on either of the first two disks, which let me install the bootstrap loader. Unfortunately, the process hung right before I reached the UNIX prompt. This *might* mean that the disk is hosed, but it may also mean that I need more memory -- the standard config was 1MB of RAM, and one of my RAM boards went south a few years ago.

So, a dilemma: I have this set of disks, possibly still readable, which I'm obliged to ship with the Lisa when it sells (the auction closes Sunday). I'd really rather not see this OS lost to history (although I probably would've said differently at the time I was using it). But the disks are serialized to my machine, Unisoft has long since moved on to other things, and IIRC the Lisa's low-level diskette formatting is odd enough that I'm not sure whether the disks can be copied.

What should I do in my few remaining days with the diskettes? "Cancel the auction" is tempting, but I've been working myself up to selling this thing for a long time, and if I don't do it now, I might not be able to later. It's unlikely to keep running forever anyhow, and I don't want to be in the Lisa-maintenance business.

I've used Service Mode to copy my machine's serial and AppleNet values. I don't know whether those are the only pieces of information the UniPlus installer uses for serialization; I don't know how to find out. I don't remember much about UniPlus, but I have the disks and installation instructions, and it looks like that makes me the world's surviving authority. (There were something like 300 students who got these; surely SOMEONE still has the stuff squirrelled away, but Google doesn't know where...)

Now what?

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. Received on 2015-07-15 16:42:52