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That reminds me, I stumbled upon the website of the Unix Heritage Society (http://www.tuhs.org/) which has the source code for the early versions of Unix.

Here is the first version

http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V1

I did not really spend enough time reading the source to understand what's going on but it's interesting regardless.

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There's also a port of V7 Unix to x86, by http://www.nordier.com/v7x86/

I only wish that there was an add-on tcp/ip stack for that version, then one could really have fun with it. Yes, I know, the ip stack add on is called BSD.

You might want to look for 2.9BSD, a PDP-11 Unix variant which was more or less v7 with the TCP stack from 4.xBSD grafted in. Patching this into an x86 port would still be a bit of a project, but it's probably easier than starting with 4.xBSD directly, or starting from scratch.

This is great advice. 2.9BSD was the first UNIX I got to play with in depth it has all the pieces you need and it can do networking.

What about 386BSD?

This version hasn't been updated in a long time. I hope the author gets back to it at some point. I've only played with it a bit, but it was very nostalgic. I think adding modern stuff to this is a bit missing the point, but it might be fun to add some sort of GUI to it, something much simpler than X Windows.

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