Seems to work fine, and the C compiler worked fine right out of the box. Or at least I was able to type out a hello.c program in vi, and type "make hello", resulting in a working Hello World. The extra compiler stuff looks to be a gnuC/C++ installation that I don't think is necessary for a toy or collectors item.
The base set comes with a lot of stuff, including n/troff and at least some of the macro packages. Shells are bourne shell and ksh. Nice to have ksh; it "feels right" on a system like this. Compact, not bloated, and plenty of power.
I was not able to find the right incantation to get the updates installed. Tried a couple of times to make install(1) do the right thing, but gave up after messing up a couple of installations. At least Virtual Box allows you to clone a system so after the first time I didn't lose anything important.
One thing I find annoying is that the system seems to fsck the filesystems on every boot. I configured mine with a single 500MB partition and filesystem, and it takes forever to check. Maybe if I do it over I'll try a small root filesystem, and then usr, tmp, and home filesystems and see if it just checks root.
But all in all, it feels like an old Unix system should - kind of like an SVR3.2, or even 2.0 system.
I'll be playing with it some more. Thanks for the pointers to this - I had never run it before.
Tom