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

[David Barto]

On Jan 20, 2020, at 10:04 AM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> 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.


My memory as well. A friend and I got ahold of the complete set of chips
and started to build out the hardware for a Unix box. We got most of the
way there too, and then the odd quirks started showing up. We tracked
some of them to our layout and the others to the NS chips. Then we gave
it up as a “ah, it would have been nice if only” project.

	David