[Simh] Simh Digest, Vol 40, Issue 6

[Kevin Handy]

Bill Pechter wrote:
> One of the fun things is to boot either 2.11BSD or v7 Unix  on a PDP11
> and show how small and primitive "real" Unix is...
>
> 'Course showing them an emulated VAX with VAX/VMS or 4.x BSD also works.
> NetBSD Vax is also slick.

Then, you can show them what happens when you
"rm -rf /" as root, or its equivalent, followed by
repairing it by copying over a backup hard disk image.

Follow with a discussion about having a toy system
like this for software development and testing.
The ability to test unsafe behavior, or doing some
one-way operation, and then quickly restore yourself
back to a known good state, is one of my favorite
tricks.

Sometimes it's the stupid things make the biggest
impression.