Jason Stevens <neozeed(a)gmail.com> writes: It was certainly that way with 386BSD. Jolitz released 0.0, and a lot of us made improvements. Then he released 0.1, with none of our improvements at all in it. We pulled up all our fixes, and made more. Then he released 0.2, still with nothing from the net included. That's when NetBSD was born. (FreeBSD forked off later, due to disagreements over whether to concentrate on Intel processors (the FreeBSD crowd), or stick to the multi-platform approach (NetBSD).) -tih -- Self documenting code isn't. User application constraints don't. --Ed Prochak

That's about what I understood from as well from reading this column at http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/tin/P/199503.shtml "The 386BSD release CD-ROM includes a mixture of BSD and Jolitz code, articles, and what have you. The files are hyperlinked with a global glossary and index to illustrate the structure and interdependence in the discussion of the system files. Consequently, the CD-ROM release is not freeware, as a whole, though many parts of it are freely redistributable. In particular, the system itself will be available at certain "official" Internet sites, still(unfortunately) to be determined at press time." and I have dug around long enough to assume that 15 years later it is still TBD where to get just the system. The stuff in WinHelp format being useless, ok, but what about the system on the CD, did you ever try booting and installing it? /Jacob

Well worst case, you can run windows under Qemu.... attach the generic text only printer, and 'print' out the help files too...... Sadly the winhelp format has drifted between the windows 3.x , then 9x/NT 3.51 releases, and the htmlhelp thing... MS never really documents it that well, as it's just such a hack... That when it works, it works well, otherwise... it's a nightmare to make documents for. On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 1:32 PM, Carl Lowenstein <carl.lowenstein(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:

Well I've been able to find this much out... The CD has some kind of weird 'live' CD filesystem to it... It would seem that 386BSD 1.0 demanded you have an Adaptec 1542 controller hooked up, and with special roms & whatnot it could 'boot' from the CD... Needless to say, this predates anything like IDE CDROM's or or what most emulators will emulate. That being said, they did include the 'boot' program which is touched on in the magazine series, as a MS-DOS bootloader. So I've just slapped together a MS-DOS floppy, with the boot & 386bsd kernel and tried it on on Qemu, to an early kernel panic. Oddly enough, Virtual PC 2007 can boot the kernel. So I converted my 386BSD 0.1 install into a disk image that Virtual PC can run, and ran the floppy, and it was able to mount up the hard disk, run single user mode, and even go into multiuser... If it matters this is what the boot produces: A:\>boot 386bsd Text 466944 Data 20480 Start 0xfe000000 can't open emm 386BSD Release 1.0 by William & Lynne Jolitz. [1.0.22 10/27/94 15:32] Copyright (c) 1989-1994 William F. Jolitz. All rights reserved. clk: irq0 pc: pc0 <color> port 60 irq1 aux: port 310 irq12 wd: wd0 <Virtual HD> wd1 port 1f0 irq14 fd: fd0: 1.44M port 3f0 irq6 drq2 com: com1: fifo port 3f8 irq4 com: com2: fifo port 2f8 irq3 lpt: lpt0 port 378 irq7 npx: npx: irq13 mcd: port 300 irq10 erase ^?, kill ^U, intr ^C # I'll have to test later if it can 'mount' an ISO image that's been 'dd''d to a hard disk.....

El 04/05/2010, a las 20:37, Jacob Goense escribió: SCSI HBAs with integrated boot firmware in BIOS compatible way (that is, trapping INT 13h) can be used to boot ANYTHING in SCSI that behaves like a random access block device. That means, floppies, LS-120, ZIP, hard disks, CD-ROMs.

FWLIW, I also bought a copy, way back when, and I've just made an unencumbered version, containing only the 386BSD binaries, the 386BSD source trees, and the manuals. It contains only the BSD-copyright material; everything else appears to be Dr Dobbs-copyrighted, thus off-limits; but I'll upload the tar.bz2 file (2MB) if people feel it's needed. I did at one stage sanitize the MS .hlp file documentation, turning it into ASCII with MS-DOS cr/lf, but I threw that away at some stage. Again, FWLIW, the CDROM wouldn't boot on my hardware when I bought it, and I couldn't access the source - without putting some thought into it. I eventually did, and copied it to my Linux machine. Anyone interested? Warren? (I did think of attaching it to this email, but figured out that was unfriendly and would lead to tears, so I didn't ... :) Wesley Parish On Sun, 25 Apr 2010, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: -- Clinersterton beademung, with all of love - RIP James Blish ----- George Kelischek - "To impress those high-tech computer types, tell them what an Ocarina really is: an animal-activated-solid-state-multi-frequency-sound-synthesizer." ----- Mau e ki, he aha te mea nui? You ask, what is the most important thing? Maku e ki, he tangata, he tangata, he tangata. I reply, it is people, it is people, it is people.

It appears you're right about the Dr Dobbs copyright - no copyright notices. Quoting Greg 'groggy' Lehey &lt;grog(a)lemis.com&gt;om>: "Sharpened hands are happy hands. "Brim the tinfall with mirthful bands" - A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge "I me. Shape middled me. I would come out into hot!" I from the spicy that day was overcasked mockingly - it's a symbol of the other horizon. - emacs : meta x dissociated-press

Le 26/04/2010 19:52, Jason Stevens a écrit : Hi, in attachment, an fast and really dirty awk script to convert TXT files to HTML ones... :-) for i in *.TXT; do awk -f bsd.awk "$i" >| "${i%.TXT}.HTM"; done 90% of the works should be good. PS : there is at least 2 typos : diff _/CPU.TXT ./CPU.TXT 27c27 < 386BSD cpu_tfork() Design Choices and Trade-Offs --- diff _/OBJECT.TXT ./OBJECT.TXT 64c64 < What is vm_object_remove()? --- Regards, Cyrille Lefevre -- mailto:Cyrille.Lefevre-lists@laposte.net

P.S. (sorry for following up to myself) I had a look into the files, and the system comes with commented source code in assembler. FWIW this is a full distribution, including development environment (C, Cobol, Fortran-77,..), editors, kernel, VSAM database, etc... all of it with source code and documentation, From my first cursory look most of it is written in assemble, comes with sample test code and is documented enough to be understandable. The pascal, cobol and fortran 77 compilers are written in pascal (!), the C compiler is written in assembler. It looks like the environment must have been only vaguely UNIX-like but yet I find it mesmerizing enough considering where it ran and when. It adds another dimension to understand the impact UNIX had and how it spun off lookalikes and sprung the imagination of developers of the time expanding its heritage sideways. j -- EMBnet/CNB Scientific Computing Service Solving all your computer needs for Scientific Research. http://bioportal.cnb.csic.es http://www.es.embnet.org _______________________________________________ TUHS mailing list TUHS(a)minnie.tuhs.org https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs Wow, what a blast from the past. I used Flex on the Radio Shack Color Computer in 64MB of memory in the '80s for a while. Yes, the entire thing was assembly and some Fortran. I did not have the source to most of it for my version, only the compiled binaries. The version I used ran off floppy disks, of course, and used a strange sector layout. Something like 17 sectors of 256 bytes, instead of the 18 sectors 256 bytes that the Color Computer usually used. Neat system in some ways. Way more "professional" then is peers, except for OS/9 from Microware. Flex was only very vaguely Unix, however. OS/9, which I used a whole lot on the Color Computer and Color Computer 3, was a lot more Unix like. I understand that the 6809 version is floating around the Net. It was also all 6809 assembly, multitasking and multiuser. Very Unix V4/V5/V6 like in a number of ways. -- Brad Spencer - brad(a)anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS http://anduin.eldar.org - & - http://anduin.ipv6.eldar.org [IPv6 only]