Getting started

First launch

Open the app and leave it alone for about half a minute. It is not loading — it isbooting. The boot block reads the kernel off an emulated RP07 disk, the kernel probes its hardware, /etc/rc checks the filesystems and starts the network, andinit puts a login prompt on each terminal line.

While that happens the app also does something a 1985 machine could not do for itself: it creates an account. Your macOS short user name becomes a Unix account with a home directory under /usr, and the terminal marked tty01 logs itself in as that account.

Boot
: hp(0,0)unix
Unix Edition 8 -- ipnx Release 1.0 (2026-08-16)
real mem  = 8388608
avail mem = 7294976
hp0: RP07
network: il0 10.0.2.15, gateway 10.0.2.2

login: christie
Welcome to ipnx v8 (Eighth Edition Research Unix).

For copyright, please refer to /etc/copyright

Fortune favours the brave.
$ 

The account it makes

You are not root, deliberately. Research Unix has no sudo, so becoming the superuser is su at a shell — but ordinary work should not happen there, and the machine is more interesting as somebody's account than as an administrator's console.

There is no password. This is a personal machine emulating a personal machine, on a disk you already have in your hands, and a password prompt with no recovery path would be a nuisance protecting nothing. If you want one, passwd works as it always did.

The name is truncated where it has to be: Eighth Edition allows eight characters for a login and fourteen for any file name, and it does not negotiate.

Quitting, and coming back

Quit normally (⌘Q) and the app takes a snapshot of the running machine — processors, memory, open files, everything — and writes it beside the disk. Next launch restores it, so you come back in a couple of seconds to precisely where you were, mid-command if that is where you stopped.

Do not force-quit it. That is the one rule this machine has, and it is the same rule a real VAX had: a filesystem keeps data in memory that has not yet reached the disk, and pulling the power loses it. See troubleshootingfor what a clean shutdown looks like and what to do if it happens anyway.

Where your things live

Everything the emulated machine knows is inside one file,~/Library/Application Support/ipnx/v8/v8.disk. You can copy it, back it up, or export it from Settings. Files you keep on your Mac are better kept on your Mac andreached through a shared folder, which is what/n/macos and /n/home are for.

Where to go next

If you know Unix, you already know what to do — but the two things worth trying immediately are mux, which downloads a window system into the terminal, and the manual:man man works, and the whole Eighth Edition manual is on the disk.