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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!newshost.telstra.net!act.news.telstra.net!psgrain!news.uoregon.edu!news.emf.net!gatech!swrinde!tank.news.pipex.net!pipex!blackbush.xlink.net!rz.uni-karlsruhe.de!news.uni-stuttgart.de!uni-regensburg.de!newsserv.uni-bayreuth.de!news.tu-chemnitz.de!irz401!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc Subject: Re: Curious about *BSD History Date: 5 Apr 1996 10:12:21 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 109 Message-ID: <4k2rm5$ok4@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <4k1nue$lm8@orb.direct.ca> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.3 Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:16685 comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:2769 ken@direct.ca (Ken Clark) writes: I'll try to answer what i can from mind. I do also have all the old mails around, but i'm too lazy now to wipe the dust off the MOD where they're mouldring on. :) > What happened to Jolitz? Or: has anybody heard something from him lately? > What happened that so radically changed his > position on 386BSD? (If you read the old release notes, there were very > grandiose plans). What happened that caused him not to make any releases > after 0.1? Why did he not support the patchkits? From my point of view, many thousand miles away, the story looked like the following: The Jolitz' intended to create an academic Unix system platform, where they could do code analysis, examine system internals, and experiment. This required a `live system', nothing like Net-2 or 4.4BSD-Lite that could not reproduce theirselves. However, the times weren't what they expected. By the time 386BSD 0.0 has been released (early 1992), the gap between the improving PC hardware (VM-capable CPUs, ever larger disks, RAM counting by Megabytes, all this affordable to the masses, not only to large organizations) and the tight limitations of messy DOS became more and more annoying to the people. Remember, this was the same time when a Finnish student named Linus Torvalds started playing with an i386 protected mode task switcher. Linux was at version 0.12 or so when 386BSD 0.0 popped up, it was quite incomplete, and about nobody knew about it. I've stumpled across it on the FTP server when looking out for 386BSD 0.0. So finally, the Internet took the `gift' with a great pleasure, now seeing that there was something you could basically work with, that had the potential to become a full-featured Unix operating system. For people with a Unix background, BSD did already have a good name, and now was the time to get the Unix from the beloved Vaxen down to the home PeeCee. 386BSD 0.1 followed quickly (0.0 was about in February 1992, 0.1 in June). Later in the game, the Jolitz' must have realized that everything went out of their control. The system was there, the source code too, and people started hacking and eliminating the bugs, improving the system, adding new drivers, new commands etc. This was most likely far beyond what they expected, but also far beyond what they would have liked to see. They fell in total silence. The patchkit evolved for about one year, until nobody was able to handle it any longer. > The FreeBSD history > says that Jolitz "withdrew his support" for the BSD interim (later FreeBSD) > project. Why? Despite of my suspicions, only Bill himself will be able to answer this. > Does anyone have any old posts from the era explaining this? I do have old mails, but the biggest problem is that the Jolitz didn't talk/write much to anybody out there. So you certainly won't find posts about this. > Wasn't there to be a 386BSD 1.0 from Jolitz alone to be released > on CDROM? Did this happen? It happened, but it happend *way* later (and has been deferred over and over again). The Copyright on it say 1994, but i think it's been even later that it has been released. The title is ``386BSD Reference CD-ROM'', and that makes their intentions clear. > I seem to recall people saying Jolitz > was writing a book on BSD. Did he? It is said to have been published a week ago. > Next, why exactly did *BSD fracture into FreeBSD and NetBSD? Remember the patchkit. It was no langer manageable by mid-1993. Two groups of people independently sought for a way out of the dilemma. They didn't know about each other until the projects were founded. The strong personalities of the founders of both groups were the hindering to get together again. Since the reasons are mostly of personal nature, not technical, this also explains why it isn't easy to merge both streams again. > Finally, and I know I am going to get it for this one, what happened to > Jesus Monroe Jr? I am actually more serious about this question than > you might suspect -- he was a household name to anyone who was on USENET > in 1993 and deserves a page in history. Did he eventually make it > into everyone's kill file and go away? Got committed maybe? Did > he ever release his famous QIC-40 tape driver? His floppy driver has been released, i don't know about his QIC-40 driver. Even 386BSD 1.0 doesn't use his famous floppy driver however, and it seems he's been pissed off here... He's often got many things wrong (i remember a long debate about the usage of PIT timers and DMA channels for dRAM refresh), but you're right, he's a certain piece of the history as well. (I don't have kill files at all, so i would have seen his postings in either of the *BSD newsgroups if there were any.) -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)