Re: UniPlus UNIX: oops...

Can you make disk images (Using Disk Copy 4.2 on a Mac) of them before you ship them off?

On Feb 13, 2008, at 3:03 PM, -jeffB wrote:

>
> ...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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