[TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question")

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Friday, 17 January 2020 at 22:50:51 -0500, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
>
> In the super-early days (late 1991, early 1992), those of us who
> worked on it just wanted a "something Unix-like" that we could run at
> home (my first computer was a 40 MHz 386 with 16 MB of memory).  This
> was before the AT&T/BSD Lawsuit (which was in 1992) and while Jolitz
> may have been demonstrating 386BSD in private, I was certainly never
> aware of it

At the start of this time, Bill was working for BSDI, who were
preparing a commercial product that (in March 1992) became BSD/386.
As Rob Kolstad told me in mid-1992, he had a (to put it mildly)
difference of opinion with Rob, and probably others, about the
commercial nature (at the time BSD/386 cost $1000), and he resigned at
the end of 1991.  So 386BSD presumably didn't exist before that.

On the other hand, Bill did write the articles in Dr. Dobbs Journal,
which started in January 1991, so my best guess is that Linus just
wasn't informed about the developments.  It's easy to forget how
difficult it was to get this kind of information in those days.  I was
informed about the articles, but more by chance than anything else.  I
didn't find out about BSD/386 until March 1992, when the first betas
were released.

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft mail program
reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 163 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20200118/1fb9275b/attachment.sig>