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

[Greg A. Woods]

At Mon, 20 Jan 2020 14:09:00 -0500, "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso at mit.edu> wrote:
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question")
>
> On Sun, Jan 19, 2020 at 07:32:57PM -0800, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> > > Out of curiosity, did the articles contain download information for a
> > > bootable copy of 386BSD?
> >
> > Yes, they did:
> >
> >      https://www.drdobbs.com/porting-unix-to-the-386-the-final-step/184408800
>
> .... which is dated July 1992, and describes a "launch" of 386BSD
> Release 0.0 in March 17, 1992.  This is contemporaneous with Linux
> 0.95a (which by coincidence was also released on March 17th, 1992.)

Yes, though as I recall all of the articles mentioned that the OS could
be downloaded, but I pointed at that final article as it was the first
one in which I found explicit mention of the FTP server name(s).

> The first "real" distribution, the Soft Landing System, was released
> in May 1992.  (The Manchester Computer Centre distribution in November
> 1991 was a floppy-based distro containing command-line and development
> utilities, but not X Windows, so some people don't feel it counts as a
> full-featured distribution.)

The actual 386bsd Release 0.0 (the one done directly by Bill and Lynne
Jolitz) announcement is dated "March 7, 1992" according to the first
post about it on comp.unix.bsd (and according to that announcement there
was a meeting at Apple in Cupertino (SVNet) on the 11'th where copies of
the floppies were made available for copying (comp.unix.bsd:
<2763 at tardis.Tymnet.COM>).

Note that according to an article from Unigram ("Issue 396", dated
August 3-7, 1992, (p)re-posted by Tom Limoncelli in comp.unix.bsd) this
"386bsd 0.0" was actually a re-write of earlier work to create a "386"
based release of BSD.  Apparently UCB lawyers asked Jolitz to destroy
all the initial work done for the release, and he complied and rewrote
what became 0.0 from scratch again, starting with the plain NET2
release.  (comp.unix.bsd: <1992Aug1.020513.14170 at plts.uucp>)

I would argue that in one way of looking at things NetBSD (and by
extension FreeBSD) really started with the 0.0 patch kit, and that's
also dated March 15, 1992 by Chris Demetriou.  I agree though that the
creation of the first commits in the CVS repository represent a more
direct reflection of the intent to create a unique thing called NetBSD.

(On March 13, 1992 there was a post by Mike Stump on comp.unix.bsd
asking for someone to coordinate patches for 386bsd; and Pace Willisson
posted the first patch in response on March 14, 1992; and Chris replied
on the same day saying he would put such patches up on
agate.berkeley.edu; and the "README.PATCHES" file appeared there on
March 15, 1992.)

--
					Greg A. Woods <gwoods at acm.org>

Kelowna, BC     +1 250 762-7675           RoboHack <woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>     Avoncote Farms <woods at avoncote.ca>
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