[TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question")
Larry McVoy
lm at mcvoy.com
Tue Jan 21 04:04:32 AEST 2020
On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 12:19:25PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 19, 2020 at 10:52 PM George Michaelson <ggm at algebras.org> wrote:
>
> > It does me no credit, that I initially reacted very badly to 386BSD,
> > and the initial {Net,Free,Open} situation.
> >
> First, be careful. What we sometimes call 386BSD as a 'release' started
> just as a port of NET2 to the 386 based 'commodity' hardware platform. The
> history is that in the late 1970s/early 80s Bill Jolitz was working for Nat
> Semi and ported BSD 4.1, to a multibus based NS16032 board that NS had
> built, which was similar to the Stanford University Network (SUN) terminal
> what had a 68000. He eventually built a 'luggable' using that and updated
> to the port to 4.2++. He (and Lynn I believe) started a company to sell
> that hardware/software solution and for whatever reason, it did not really
> take off.
I know those Nat Semi chips very well, or did at the time. I so wanted to
love those chips, the instruction set felt like whoever did the PDP-11
did the 320xx chips. But they couldn't produce chips without bugs and
that killed them. It's a crying shame, I liked the instruction set
WAY better than the VAX. The VAX seemed really messing compared to
the PDP-11, the 320xx chips seemed clean. Might be rose colored
glasses but that's my memory.
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