4.3BSD Quasijarus on the RA82
Berkeley's VAX Unix as the Quasijarus project preserved it — 4.3BSD with the fixes of 1999 on an MSCP disk, with TK50 tape, DZV11 serial lines and DELQA Ethernet, booting straight from DUA0 on a MicroVAX II.
| Bus | QBUS · QBone |
|---|---|
| Needs | A MicroVAX II (KA630) — this machine is a VAX, and no PDP-11 will boot it. |
| Guest | 4.3BSD Quasijarus |
| Cards | UDA50 · RA82 · TQK50 · TK50 · DZV11 · DELQA |
| Download | 47 MB |
| Added | 2026-08-31 |
| Maintainer | QUniLator project — contact |
Why it exists
The canonical VAX Unix, alive: vi, the C compiler, troff and the Berkeley userland on the machine class 4.3BSD called home. The Quasijarus releases kept stock 4.3BSD building and running rather than modernizing it away.
Using it
- Set the console characters to 7-bit first (Machine, External console): 4.3BSD drives its console with even parity, as its terminals expected, and with the top bit kept the text arrives mangled.
- Switch the machine on; the KA630 boots DUA0 by itself, or type B DUA0 at the >>> prompt.
- The system comes up multi-user; log in as root, which has no password.
- The DELQA is qe0, configured by /etc/netstart as 192.168.42.254 on an imaginary 192.168.42.0/24; name lookups come from /etc/hosts, so the boot never waits on a nameserver.
- The DZV11 carries tty00-tty07; the TK50 holds a tape with a tar archive of /usr.
- Halt with fasthalt, then switch off at the >>> prompt; the next boot skips the disk checks. Plain halt leaves the checks in, and fastboot reboots directly.
Known problems
- The clock believes it is the year 2000; date sets it, within the era.
Links
Getting it onto a board
The board imports this itself once it subscribes to the catalogue — it fetches, verifies the checksum and imports, which is the route to prefer for a bundle this size.
To download it by hand and use the import dialog instead:
- quasijarus.qcfg.zip — 47 MB
sha256 b2ffe02c2876d7fc0abe59020b85e9b952c7fb601393df7e0c3669a04c79f9f2