A co-worker at our company found a VMware image for an ancient UNIX version, called UNIX V7. This version dates back to the good old days of 1979, and therefore it is now already 30 years old. He found this at Nordier.
It’s is incredible that a UNIX version of so long ago already supports multi-processing and multi-user.
I tried to run this version of UNIX on my VMware server version 2.0, but it got stuck at the command prompt. I could have spent a great deal of time getting it to work, but playing with KVM recently, I decided to convert the image to KVM.
This was quiet simple.
qemu-img convert <vmware-flat-file> -O qcow2 <kvm-file>
I then defined a new virtual machine in KVM with this new image and it all ran as a charm.
For all UNIX adepts, like me, this is a very nice thing to have and to study, just to see how it worked 30 years ago.
The complete image is available in the files section.
Just extract the files and correct the disk image path in the
v7x86.xml file and import the file into KVM.
virsh define v7x86.xml
Enjoy the files!