If the package manager on your old PC is keeping copies of everything it installs, just copy all of those packages over and go through the package manager on the new PC. Look under /var/cache

Whoa, BSD predates V7? I had no idea.

I’ve been meaning to set up an 11 running 2BSD…

Are the usb disk device names changing?

Yes, although the thing on my desk is just an x-term & media player, so “desktop system” doesn’t mean that much…

Mostly video performance (1080 vid stuttered badly, while it plays fine on the same machine under linux.) & compatability. (Not that I want to run a browser on my x-term, but it would be nice to have as a fallback option. Can’t install anything recent.) Oh, and extended attributes in the filesystem. I REALLY like being able to add name=val tags to a file. It’s immensely useful. That might be my favorite feature of linux? Funny.

Also, I was in the midst of switching from Solaris to Linux on my server, so it just seemed like a good idea to run the same OS on the desktop.

Old droid & Maemo Leste?

(That’s what I use.)

VERY simple. Time & node:

HH:MM node%

Except in the xterm I keep open for dealing with my camera. That’s time & last-word-in-cwd:

HH:MM dir%

Sometimes on a cellphone I will use battery charge percent:

BB%

And when I’m su’ed it’s just:

root%

Yup. Tried that, doesn’t work.

Void here too. I was mostly Solaris & OpenBSD for many years, Void is the first linux I’m happy to run on my main machines.

I realized I was going to be comfortable with Void when I saw in the docs that to config the network you just “put the commands in rc.local”. Ha ha. Yes, that’s how you’d do it in 7th Edition Unix! Back to the basics.

A lot of things that we assume can only be made by giant complexes of high-tech equipment were first prototyped by hand on a workbench. This sounds like a great project.

(I don’t know anything about the details of bubble memory. It’s entirely possible this is impossible. Certainly worth looking into though.)

Yeah, I’m familiar with VMS, and Cutler bringing a lot of the internal design to W/NT. (I’m told in particular a lot of the data structures for system calls in NT look like VMS.) My AIX experience has consisted entirely of “This is weird. This isn’t normal for Unix.” Ha ha. (I had a 1st gen RS/6000 at home briefly in the late 90s.)

And I do have a “grey wall” in my library:

My AIX experience is very limited. What was the VMS connection?

Windows NT ACLs come from VMS.

The Unix world has traditionally not liked ACLs because Multics had them, and Unix was an ultra-minimalist response to Multics.

TeX / LaTex documentation is infuriating. It’s either “use your university’s package to make a document that looks like this:” -or- program in alien assembly language.

I like postscript for graphic design, but not so much for typesetting. For a flyer or poster, PS is great.

It’s mostly linux now (except for most of the actual networking gear) but it wasn’t 20 years ago, so the internet is certainly “possible” without linux.

A new transaction is different than paying off a debt. You can’t legally refuse cash for payment of a debt. You can for a new transaction.

The only time I’ve done something like that, I had a friend paint my 3B2 with leopard spots. Looks great.

Heh. Presumably there’s some very old FORTRAN in there somewhere?

Booting from tape to do a clean install.

To play with fractals or cellular automata in the 80s, you read a description in Scientific American, and then wrote your own version at home. Good times.

No, except for software that represented data in virtual punched cards under the covers, for communicating with remote systems. (None of which used punched cards anymore.)