[TUHS] Re: BSD/OS

Greg 'groggy' Lehey writes: In the mid 90s I was at the U of Northern British Columbia. In late 1992 or early 93 we acqired a site licence for BSD/386 (with source) for the U. IIRC it was mosly Net/2 at the start, with some proprietary BSDi kernel (and other) enhancements. When the campus opened in 1994 we had it deployed on > 100 student PC workstations, running in a mostly "dataless" configuration (in Sun speak). It worked very well, exept for the X server, which regularly dumped core. I was more that a little surprised (and annoyed) to one day discover every one of those core dump was being emailed back to the mother ship. I forget who I takled to as BSDI about this, but they mentioned they were even more annoyed than us and had installed a custom sendmail rule to direct those messages into the bit bucket. I also recall taking my first run at FreeBSD in the fall of 1994. Release 1.05 sticks in my mind for some reason. After leaving the U, transitioning to FreeBSD was seamless. Towards the end of the 90s I was supporting a commercial IMAP server. I remember us entering into an agreement with BSDi to port and sell our code on their platform. Shortly after sealing that deal they were bought by Wind River, and their layers immediately got to work trying to undo that deal. Fuzzy memory says this was circa 2000. Apart from this, though, In 1993 I was still trying to figure out what UNIX (if any) we were going to run on the PCs in the student labs (the campus didn't open until 94). I had been eyeing up Sun's 386 offering, since I had a lot of experience with SunOS. I was at an Interop that year and tried pinning down one of the Sun sales rep's to talk about site licensing options. He could not have made it anymore more clear that anyone speaking of SunOS/Solaris on 386 should piss off! Immediately! Needless to say, BSDi won that deal. --lyndon