> By using this service, you acknowledge that terminal sessions may be logged for educational and debugging purposes. No personal data is collected beyond your IP address.
Is this all open source and is the code available? So that we know where the data is truly going?
Did they get a license from Novell for this or is this as illegal as many of the other emulator sites with copyrighted software on them? Considering the page doesn't mention it, I'm leaning towards it being copyright infringement.
> the knowledge that a buffer overflow could be exploited for arbitrary code execution had not yet come of age.
Meaning, people hadn't figured that out, or it wasn't a commonplace technique? They must have seen buffer overflows crash running software; it doesn't take much imagination to think about the next steps.
If whoever wrote this wants to add an authentic (and somewhat period correct) terminal front-end, I wrote a VT420 hardware emulator that works in the browser and we can wire them together!
I'm amused at how circular this is. Unix v4 is first OS written in C, now running on top of an unbelievable amount of C (and C++). Classic circular computer science delight.
Hey! So I'm actually the builder of UNIXV4.dev (via my company Squiz Software Pty Ltd).
I went to bed last night with a couple of people poking around… woke up to a whole lot more. Appreciate the load test!!
I’ve fixed the rate-limit issues people were hitting. There’s still a global cap of 100 concurrent sessions + per-user limits to keep things stable during spikes.
I’ve also added an “Attributions & Acknowledgements” section.
The backstory is wild: UNIX v4 being recovered from a ~1973 tape at the University of Utah after being effectively “lost” for decades. Reading about the recovery and then poking around in it under SIMH on my PC is what pushed me to wrap it up as a public, browser-based terminal that other people could take a look at - and hopefully get as much out of it as I did.
Have fun exploring it all (especially all the primitive bits — remember: use "chdir" instead of "cd", and "#" is backspace).
I spent about a week insulting Claude to get port it to x86_64. It's running nicely in QEMU. We're also trying to get the C compiler in there working as well.
23 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 47.8 ms ] thread> By using this service, you acknowledge that terminal sessions may be logged for educational and debugging purposes. No personal data is collected beyond your IP address.
Is this all open source and is the code available? So that we know where the data is truly going?
Hard to trust it if it isn't fully OSS.
This is a cool demo though.
Meaning, people hadn't figured that out, or it wasn't a commonplace technique? They must have seen buffer overflows crash running software; it doesn't take much imagination to think about the next steps.
https://mmastrac.github.io/blaze/
(the API is undocumented but stupidly simple: an async js_read() function and a sync js_write() function)
But it's lacking some features available in newer versions of ed, such as using 'n' to print line numbers.
I went to bed last night with a couple of people poking around… woke up to a whole lot more. Appreciate the load test!!
I’ve fixed the rate-limit issues people were hitting. There’s still a global cap of 100 concurrent sessions + per-user limits to keep things stable during spikes.
I’ve also added an “Attributions & Acknowledgements” section.
The backstory is wild: UNIX v4 being recovered from a ~1973 tape at the University of Utah after being effectively “lost” for decades. Reading about the recovery and then poking around in it under SIMH on my PC is what pushed me to wrap it up as a public, browser-based terminal that other people could take a look at - and hopefully get as much out of it as I did.
Have fun exploring it all (especially all the primitive bits — remember: use "chdir" instead of "cd", and "#" is backspace).
- Daniel
Things that are working: `cal 2026`, coredumps
Things that might be broken or aren't working as expected: ps (only returns "No mem")
And utmp is in /tmp?
And no /usr/sbin or /sbin? And nothing in /usr/local?
The messages from `write root` are only in uppercase.
And they still had coredumps at the time if you press ctrl-\",
Thank you for this, I enjoy digital archaeology. :)