5 Jan
2017
5 Jan
'17
9:13 a.m.
On Thu, Jan 05, 2017 at 04:00:06PM +1300, Wesley Parish wrote:
My understanding which was that of an interested
layman in 1991 and just
bitten by the bug, and based upon the comments of some of the computer
science staff of the U of Canterbury, NZ, at that time, is that 386BSD
held everybody's attention. (I mentioned in 1992 reading about Linux in
a computer mag to one of them and he told me 386BSD was where the action
was.) i80386 PCs were relatively cheap, BSD was (relatively) free from
AT&T's legal claims, and 386BSD was even freer and targeted that cheap
powerhorse. My guess is that if Sun had spun off a Free SunOS, it would've
been ported to the 386. What would've happened then is anyone's guess.
So I know the 386BSD guy, Bill Jolitz. He worked for me at Sun, I hired
him because of, well some Usenix details that are best left untold. He
was unfairly hurt by Usenix, that's as much as I'll say.
He's a good guy, a little weird, but so am I. He did some great work
in 386BSD, it was ahead of Linux. I remember going into Fry's and
sticking a 386BSD floppy in to see if it would boot. It usually did.