In article <200012201541.KAA04436@weedcon1.cropsci.ncsu.edu>,
NetBSD Bob <nbsdbob@weedcon1.cropsci.ncsu.edu> wrote:
>Don't laugh, too hard.....(:+}}...
>
>For the fun of it I am trying to collect up the earliest ports of
>BSD that will run on a MicroVAX II.  My goal is to roll up a set
>of disks with each version back through 4.3BSD-Tahoe, for some
>educational, experimental purposes.  Last night I got NetBSD-1.0A

Here's a subject that's very near and dear to my heart.  I would love to
be able to run vanilla 4.3BSD on my VaxStation 3100, even if for nothing
more than pure nostalgia and hack value.  I have my Ancient Unix Source
License and Kirk McKusick's CD archive to start with.  But 4.3BSD only
supports booting from UNIBUS and MASSBUS devices, which of course the
VS3100 doesn't have.  So, I'm somewhat stuck.

For a while, I was hoping that the NetBSD/vax bootblock and bootloader
were similar enough that I could at least get 4.3 to boot /vmunix to
the point where it went looking for a root device.  But apparently,
they aren't... I can get the NetBSD bootloader to load /vmunix, but it
hangs hard immediately.  This was about a year ago that I tried this,
with some variety of 1.4.

Of course, now that NetBSD has switched to elf binaries, the divergence
with old BSD has been widened even more.  But it occurs to me that maybe
someone else on this list has tried something similar, and may have some
advice (or at least, maybe some interesting battle-scars).

cheers,
--Mirian