On Thu, Jan 04, 2018 at 09:03:09AM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> ​You need to add >>and that he knew about and had access<<.
>
> The truth is there was and it had networking and X windows already.  Bill
> Jolitz had completed the original 386 BSD port (and actually started to
> publish about it in DDJ).

How real was it in June 1991, when he demo'ed it in Usenix Anaheim?
Was it at the level of a "MIT Media Lab demo", or was it actually
something that could be used in anger?

The official history states that 386 BSD version 0.0 was released in
March 1992, and the "much more usable" 0.1 version was released in
July 1992.

The biggest problem with Jolitz's work seems to have been more social
than anything else.  The writeups from that era seem to indicate that
the Jolitz's wanted to keep a much tighter control over things, and
this discouraged collaboration and contributions, which led to the
first of *BSD fragmentation/spin-offs, starting with FreeBSD and
NetBSD.

Contrast that to Linus, where I started playing with Linux in
September 1991 (Linux 0.09), and in three months he accepted fairly
major patches from me to implement all of the new syscalls and changes
needed to implement POSIX Job Control and POSIX termios (Linux 0.12).
The Linux developers were not spending time fighting over who would
get commit bits; we were having fun writing code.

                                                 - Ted