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

[Larry McVoy]

On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 12:19:25PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 19, 2020 at 10:52 PM George Michaelson <ggm at algebras.org> wrote:
> 
> > It does me no credit, that I initially reacted very badly to 386BSD,
> > and the initial {Net,Free,Open} situation.
> >
> First, be careful.   What we sometimes call 386BSD as a 'release' started
> just as a port of NET2 to the 386 based 'commodity' hardware platform.  The
> history is that in the late 1970s/early 80s Bill Jolitz was working for Nat
> Semi and ported BSD 4.1, to a multibus based NS16032 board that NS had
> built, which was similar to the Stanford University Network (SUN) terminal
> what had a 68000.  He eventually built a 'luggable' using that and updated
> to the port to 4.2++.   He (and Lynn I believe) started a company to sell
> that hardware/software solution and for whatever reason, it did not really
> take off.

I know those Nat Semi chips very well, or did at the time.  I so wanted to
love those chips, the instruction set felt like whoever did the PDP-11
did the 320xx chips.  But they couldn't produce chips without bugs and
that killed them.  It's a crying shame, I liked the instruction set
WAY better than the VAX.  The VAX seemed really messing compared to 
the PDP-11, the 320xx chips seemed clean.  Might be rose colored 
glasses but that's my memory.