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