Hardware

I have an old Unisys U6000/65 server I obtained as surplus about 12 years ago. For its day (1993) this server line was capable of insane ability, up to 4 gig of memory using dozens of 30-pin SIMMs and up to six processors, including mixed processor speeds and types (486/Pentium) in the same machine, EISA bus and built-in SCSI.

Mine merely has 64 meg of RAM and dual 486-50 processors with 1.5 gig of SCSI on a full-height 5.25" hard drive that revs like a jet engine powering up, but this was still very nice for 1993. It has two 10 megabit ethernet cards, and I can get it on the 'net. I also have a boot tape for it, with UNIX System V Revision 4, I think release 1.2.

It's about the size of a two-drawer file cabinet, and has been a nice lamp stand next to my bed.

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Anyway, it works okay, but it has various small annoyances like no bash shell and no up-arrow command recall, and ls doesn't have color support. I would like to have that in this old system.

Everyone uses distributions and package managers now and doesn't do barebone source installs anymore. What are my chances of getting a modern linux bash shell to compile on this thing?

Should I first try to install newer versions of the "cc" compiler, "make", "yacc", etc on it?

I am not a C/C++ programmer so directly hand-editing source to "make it go" is out of my range of capability. Upgrading the kernel is likely impossible. For that part of the system, it is what it is.


(Yes, I am aware most modern smartphones have more CPU, storage, and memory than this old thing. It's like fixing up an old car or antique farm tractor..)

I'm not sure how successful bash would be. ksh is a modern shell with a longer history, it might be more likely to go. ksh93 if you can get it, ksh88 if you can't.

My neighbor gets a lot of use out of his antique tractor. He was shoving snow around with it all winter.

You should try to determine what the executable file format is. If SCO or Unixware modules will not run, then you are restricted to whatever source will compile with your existing compiler.
By your description, the OS sounds like an early version of Unixware (before Novell purchased it.) I attached a simple C program that converts lower case to uppercase.
Usage

Code:

upper.exe abc
ABC