Venix on the Rainbow?

Posted on July 2, 2017

A few months ago I received a suprise message from Warner Losh about Venix, a distribution of UNIX System V, and its Rainbow 100 port. Specifically, someone had received a Rainbow that suprisingly came with the Venix/86R floppies. This operating system was long since thought lost for the Rainbow, though it was known to exist at some point.

Warner was able to acquire and image the floppies by using and slightly modifying some imaging software I had written for the Rainbow ages ago. After some serious stuggles, mostly related to bizarre errors in the Venix installer, I finally managed a Venix/Rainbow installation. For those interested, I posted a quite boring and blurry video of an actual Rainbow booting Venix on archive.org for all to enjoy.

Now I need to figure out what to do with this machine...