That reminds me, I stumbled upon the website of the
Unix Heritage Society (http://www.tuhs.org/) which has the source code for the early versions of Unix.
I only wish that there was an add-on tcp/ip stack for that version, then one could really have fun with it. Yes, I know, the ip stack add on is called BSD.
You might want to look for 2.9BSD, a PDP-11 Unix variant which was more or less v7 with the TCP stack from 4.xBSD grafted in. Patching this into an x86 port would still be a bit of a project, but it's probably easier than starting with 4.xBSD directly, or starting from scratch.
This version hasn't been updated in a long time. I hope the author gets back to it at some point. I've only played with it a bit, but it was very nostalgic. I think adding modern stuff to this is a bit missing the point, but it might be fun to add some sort of GUI to it, something much simpler than X Windows.
Here is the first version
http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V1
I did not really spend enough time reading the source to understand what's going on but it's interesting regardless.