[TUHS] the guy who brought up SVr4 on Sun machines

[Andy Kosela]

On Wednesday, January 4, 2017, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 05, 2017 at 04:00:06PM +1300, Wesley Parish wrote:
> > My understanding which was that of an interested layman in 1991 and just
> > bitten by the bug, and based upon the comments of some of the computer
> > science staff of the U of Canterbury, NZ, at that time, is that 386BSD
> > held everybody's attention. (I mentioned in 1992 reading about Linux in
> > a computer mag to one of them and he told me 386BSD was where the action
> > was.) i80386 PCs were relatively cheap, BSD was (relatively) free from
> > AT&T's legal claims, and 386BSD was even freer and targeted that cheap
> > powerhorse. My guess is that if Sun had spun off a Free SunOS, it
> would've
> > been ported to the 386.  What would've happened then is anyone's guess.
>
> So I know the 386BSD guy, Bill Jolitz.  He worked for me at Sun, I hired
> him because of, well some Usenix details that are best left untold.  He
> was unfairly hurt by Usenix, that's as much as I'll say.
>
> He's a good guy, a little weird, but so am I.  He did some great work
> in 386BSD, it was ahead of Linux.  I remember going into Fry's and
> sticking a 386BSD floppy in to see if it would boot.  It usually did.
>

It had tons of bugs though.  That is why Jordan Hubbard and Rod Grimes
started unofficial 386BSD patchkit which transformed into FreeBSD;
"unofficial" because Bill Jolitz was very hard to work with, to say the
least...

--Andy
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