The crazy thing about say the rise and fall of Danger (NetBSD) you had BSD+Mach (NeXTSTEP) striking back on the iPhone, the amazing adoption of Linux on the Android front and the spectacular failure of Microsoft and their stop gap OS, Windows CE (which is without a doubt one of the biggest mistakes they ever made) and how NT/OS2 / Windows NT also made it to mobile space but was too late to the market and withdrawn.
Although the race to bring computers to the masses via smartphones certainly was a big deal, but it was all the same players of the '88-93 wars.
The real surprise is how a rigid Linux distribution found such wide spread adoption, how NeXT finally found widespread adoption, and how NT was unable to lock in corporate middleware unlike how it did on the desktop.
I've owned them all, the danger sidekick was so amazing but the lack of SDK's was embarrassing, then Microsoft bought them and effectively dismantled them (anyone remember the Kin?) which really showed their lost ways. Once rhr iPhone had been jailbreaked being able to ssh in and out of the phone was amazing, but for me the lockdown was just too much. CE has been so neglected that ie4 in 2007 was such a joke. Android was a rough ride, but it was available globally with wildly varying apps but it had so much buzz outside of western Europe and North America. Windows phone was a dud until they finally got the NT kernel running but by then they had changed API directions and platforms so much they alienated everyone. I still love my Lumia 1020.
Its no wonder that USL has no dog in the hunt. Just like how whatever modern sco is called repackaging FreeBSD.
From: Adam Thornton
Sent: Monday, July 15, 1:48 AM
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Thanks for Virtuallyfun! (was Re: Happy birthday, 386BSD!)
To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
> 1988-1993 was so incredibly pivotal, much more than say 2014-2019. I wonder if we will ever see such a powerful window of change like that ever again.
We did but no one was paying attention. It was 2007-2010. The iPhone and Android were introduced, and the computing world went from an Intel-architecture monopoly (which it had pretty much become by 2005) to an Intel/ARM duopoly (because Intel and AMD focused too much on performance and not enough on making a low-power implementation of the architecture; an Intel-compatible chip *could* have won the mobile wars, but didn't). In the next couple years iPhone and Android (both on ARM) massacred all of the mobile competition.
That also meant that the underlying OS for mobile devices became, you guessed it, Unix (or at least something that smells a lot like it). Which is weird, given that something designed for single-threaded composible text-filtering operations is now running almost all of the world's multithreaded user-facing graphical applications, but that's the vagaries of history for you.
Adam
It's always nice to get such nice fan mail. Ever since the early days of SIMH and PUPS I've been a fan of the idea of being able to help others discover and run ancient Unix.
It's amazing how fast things moved when looking back at the 5 years after the wide stream adoption of the 80386, and how many things have risen and fallen in that time period, how many failed to only come back and win.
1988-1993 was so incredibly pivotal, much more than say 2014-2019. I wonder if we will ever see such a powerful window of change like that ever again.
Definitely a happy birthday to 386BSD!
From: Michael Huff
Sent: Sunday, July 14, 4:18 PM
Subject: [TUHS] Thanks for Virtuallyfun! (was Re: Happy birthday, 386BSD!)
Hi
Personally, I'm very grateful for the amount of time you've spent not simply finding and posting the things you do (this, cmu mach, the BSD and Unix stuff) but also the blog entries you write that spell out the steps you take to get it all running.
As someone who came along much later (slackware 3.5?, freebsd 2.2-something) but has a lot of interest/curiosity about what the older days were like it's very helpful and illuminating.
Oh! ...and of course, Happy Birthday 386BSD!
Regards,
-a Virtuallyfun fan/reader
On 7/13/2019 10:53 PM, Jason Stevens wrote:
Getting this to build was such a tremendous effort. Although last time I revisited my 386BSD 0.0 work even under emulation it ran too fast and had issues.
But it's really a tremendous effort what Bill and Lynne had done, by pushing out not only a running version of Net/2 but a self hosting version of Net/2 for the lowly and utterly common and commodity 386.
Its a shame the BSDSS and later N2SS from CMU (ports of 4.4 / Net/2) to Mach 3. But that USL vs BSDi/CSRG lawsuit cut short what should have the shot heard around the world moment.
It was shockingly hard to chase down 386BSD 0.0 just as it was to find NetBSD 0.8 and 0.9
Im just sad I was in the dark about BSD at that time, all the Unix people I knew hid behind their RS/6000s and SUN workstations while me and all my peers were all all running Linux.
But there is nothing like the feeling of running make world, or building a custom kernel when compared to just running a binary set.
Since 0.1 is more capable, here is a download for Windows users for it ready to run.
386BSD was released on this day in 1992, when William and Lynne Jolitz started the Open Source movement; well, that's what my notes say, and corrections are welcome (I know that Gilmore likes to take credit for just about everything). -- Dave