Fun. Wonderful story I can't believe I didn't know. So, Ozalp was my Cornell CS414/15 professor in 1985 who taught me operating systems and specifically I implemented Unix-like virtual memory as our project (using the Hoca simulator). I had no idea! (posted screen shots on x)
Great article,.. I love the rich detail, and the back stories. Please forgive some nit-picking I am unable to help myslef on... Unix history and restoring 2.11BSD's original release tape with historical artifacts from patches, mailing lists, etc (now lost) was my COVID projects...
You omitted the University of Wollongong who had their Interdata port done first (it was the first to boot, the other two efforts you mentioned finished just after). Plus ZFS and dtrace were ported to FreeBSD well before NetBSD (it's more of its innovation). And you missed the "patchkit group for 386BSD which produced patches to Jolitzs' work before NetBSD and FreeBSD branching out from that original group (though you are correct NetBSD got its act together a little before FreeBSD got going. Much of the 4.3 port to the 2.x source base (which made the V7 kernel more useful) didn't complete until 2.11BSD.... which itself is still a going concern thanks to the PiDP-11 offerings (making it the oldest, continuously updated BSD)... I'd be happy to be more specific based on the research I did for my Usenix talk a few years ago... One of the other key things I learned about the times were the divide between the haves (those with AT&T paperwork) and the have nots (thoses without). While there was very much an open source spirit in the haves group, the have nots group made the eventual open source movement more extreme. BSD came from the USENIX/HAVES group while Linux came from the have nots group and that informed the stringency of the licensing terms that persists to this day in the CMU/MIT/BSD vs GNU... Netflix also uses FreeBSD because it's able to handle the volumes of traffic much better than anthing else we've tried.
Apple's MacOS has BSD at its core as well. The kernel is MACH based (which is a 4.3BSD derrivative whose VM wound up in 4.4BSD when the SunOS vm donation fell through). Much of the non-graphical userland is based on a mix of FreeBSD and NetBSD and is kinda sorta available as Darwin...
It would be interesting to read about the relationship between GNU and BSD, some of the commercial aspects of the BSD vs AT&T timeline seems like it had an effect on GNU.
Fun. Wonderful story I can't believe I didn't know. So, Ozalp was my Cornell CS414/15 professor in 1985 who taught me operating systems and specifically I implemented Unix-like virtual memory as our project (using the Hoca simulator). I had no idea! (posted screen shots on x)
Great article,.. I love the rich detail, and the back stories. Please forgive some nit-picking I am unable to help myslef on... Unix history and restoring 2.11BSD's original release tape with historical artifacts from patches, mailing lists, etc (now lost) was my COVID projects...
You omitted the University of Wollongong who had their Interdata port done first (it was the first to boot, the other two efforts you mentioned finished just after). Plus ZFS and dtrace were ported to FreeBSD well before NetBSD (it's more of its innovation). And you missed the "patchkit group for 386BSD which produced patches to Jolitzs' work before NetBSD and FreeBSD branching out from that original group (though you are correct NetBSD got its act together a little before FreeBSD got going. Much of the 4.3 port to the 2.x source base (which made the V7 kernel more useful) didn't complete until 2.11BSD.... which itself is still a going concern thanks to the PiDP-11 offerings (making it the oldest, continuously updated BSD)... I'd be happy to be more specific based on the research I did for my Usenix talk a few years ago... One of the other key things I learned about the times were the divide between the haves (those with AT&T paperwork) and the have nots (thoses without). While there was very much an open source spirit in the haves group, the have nots group made the eventual open source movement more extreme. BSD came from the USENIX/HAVES group while Linux came from the have nots group and that informed the stringency of the licensing terms that persists to this day in the CMU/MIT/BSD vs GNU... Netflix also uses FreeBSD because it's able to handle the volumes of traffic much better than anthing else we've tried.
Apple's MacOS has BSD at its core as well. The kernel is MACH based (which is a 4.3BSD derrivative whose VM wound up in 4.4BSD when the SunOS vm donation fell through). Much of the non-graphical userland is based on a mix of FreeBSD and NetBSD and is kinda sorta available as Darwin...
What a great article! Thank you
It would be interesting to read about the relationship between GNU and BSD, some of the commercial aspects of the BSD vs AT&T timeline seems like it had an effect on GNU.
Thanks,
Simon