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

[Clem Cole]

On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 2:10 PM Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu> wrote:

> .... which is dated July 1992, and describes a "launch" of 386BSD

Ouch....  this is why people get confused. I'm probably not helping by not
being precise enough.

386/Net/Free/OpenBSD as >>projects<< are different from the original 386
work that Bill and Lynn did to get it running on the first 386 and get that
code back into the CRSG project.   The 386 was released in 1985 by Intel.
A number of firms started to use it.  Wikipedia says Compaw was first (The
Compaq Deskpro 386/25 was '89 according to google and we used a Wyse 32:16
at Stellar before that).  Bill Jolitz did is work originally on a Multibus
based 386 from Intel (using his NS system to bootstrap) and moved it to the
PC (I thought a Deskpro) shortly after it started to ship.

Most of us call that work '386BSD' but it was 4.X BSD that booted on a 386
based PC and not really what you are discussing.  These bits are/were the
'hidden' ftp - which is not to be confused with the first BSD 'distro' for
the 386 which would be much more public,

BTW: The original BSD on a 386, install was very rough.   Bill had created
the boot floppies on his NS system.   You had a use a DOS program to create
them via an image copy and the boot was really funky.   As I said, the
original AT driver was wrong, and kept getting hosed until I fixed it when
I was consulting for NCR (on their 386 system in 1989).   IIRC Jolitz had
created it by looking at that Minx AT driver and made some guess.   I had
(think I still have) the WD1003 documents, so I knew what the registers
really looked like and it was not handling some error conditions IIRC.

And the naming is really the root of the whole argument BTW....   BSD 4.x
for a 386 based system *vs.* a real distribution.   Bill Jolitz tried to
make a better release for a BSD on a 386 (*a.k.a.* 386BSD)  The install for
a PC/386 improved. IIRC, Intel had paid CMU to do some work as part of
Andrew and the Mach stuff (Bob Barron was the author of this I believe).,
 They wrote a version fdisk, and a bunch of things to allow dual booting
and some other tools that ran on DOS.  I don't remember how, but Bill
Jolitz got that code and very early on the BSD 386 port used it - probably
as part of the CMU/Mach to CSRG push/intermixing.

And later on yet to Jordan's credit, and it was after Linux, NetBSD, *etc*
was all there, that FreeBSD, completely redid the install scripts and made
the system that pretty much is the model for all current PC based systems
now.   In fact, around that time I had started work with Linux and one of
the things liked about FreeBSD 1.x was the install compared to the
original  Linus package (although I had an early Slackware pretty earlier
in my Linux time and that improved things).  I think your comment and about
the healthy competition was true, each team was trying to do better.
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