[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

Tom Ivar Helbekkmo tih at hamartun.priv.no
Thu Feb 8 03:52:23 AEST 2018


Theodore Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu> writes:

> Indeed.  From http://www.freebsddiary.org/linux.php, "Why is Linux
> Successful?  An Opinion", published at Uniforum NZ in April 1999:
>
>     "Linux has always had a pragmatic view of hardware, whist the BSDs
>     carried a purist view. When I got my first 386 I had MFM style
>     disk drives. At that the BSDs only supported SCSI.  [...]

I wonder when that was...  *My* first 386 was the one I ran 386bsd on,
and later, when it came into existence, NetBSD.  It had good old ST506
type disk drives (20MB MFM drives, but I formatted them RLL to get 30MB
out of them).  Managed to get four such drives onto it, actually, by
modifying the driver to support multiple controllers, and then rewiring
one controller to hook it to a different interrupt line on the ISA bus.

See item 5.1.7 here: http://www.csci.csusb.edu/dick/doc/386bsd.FAQ.txt

-tih
-- 
Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance
of Lisp.  Lisp is the most important idea in computer science.  --Alan Kay
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