Re: [TUHS] Last officially distributed and currently available BSD version

On Oct 22, 2017 1:39 AM, "Will Senn" <will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote: [...] What is the last bootable and installable media, officially distributed by Berkeley? Is that image currently publicly accessible? What is the closest version, that is currently available, that would match the os described in "The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System"? Probably one of the best ways to get questions about installation media answered is to simply email Kirk McKusick. He's a really nice guy and will probably give you an answer pretty quickly. That said, of the three distributions you mentioned, bootable/installable media only existed for 4.4BSD (also called the "encumbered" distribution). -Lite and -Lite2 were "reference distributions." It didn't take *too* much work to get -Lite working, but it wasn't something that ran out of the box (or more properly, off of the tape). The original idea was to release 4.4BSD-encumbered to Unix source licensees, and at the same time publish 4.4BSD-Lite sans the redacted bits as an open source distribution. These were to be the final BSD releases from UCB, but the CSRG found they had some coin left in the coffers a few months later, so they did -Lite2 as something of a final hurrah snapshotting some ongoing maintenance work (and possibly some research?) before officially shutting down. At one point, I had a copy of a bootable exabyte tape with 4.4-encumbered installation and source images for SPARC, specifically sun4c machines, that I had liberated from somewhere. My understanding was that the reference hardware at Berkeley was 68030- and 68040-based HP 9000 machines, and the SPARC bits were a contribution from Chris Torek. I got -Lite running on an older SPARCstation 1, but it wasn't particularly reliable (the compiler would segfault, and it panic'ed once a day or so), so we put SunOS back on it pretty quickly. Hope that helps. - Dan C.