In many ways 386bsd in '92 was a flawed jewel. What it did is point the way, bust open a door. IIRC The first AT&T lawsuit was still going on, the SCO version of that farce was yet to arrive and we were living in a world where people with BSD copyright include files in AT&T licenced code were watching AT&T try to argue BSD were the bad guys.
Bill and Lynn were holding on to an idea and put something out there which lit a fire under a community, used to Berkeley licenced code.
Dr Dobbs helped. The work Keith Bostic started in the eighties unwinding att sourced code was huge too.
It wasn't complete but it was enough. Sometimes, "enough" is what we need.
I had access to BSD tapes, ran vaxes, sun's and the like, I'd done my time on pdp11s. Being able to move that experience beyond the IBM pc-rt (there was a licenced BSD port to the romp chip) onto the emerging commodity hardware pc was amazing.
Maybe the real firelighter moment was the mmu enabled 386?
Bill and Lynn were holding on to an idea and put something out there which lit a fire under a community, used to Berkeley licenced code.
Dr Dobbs helped. The work Keith Bostic started in the eighties unwinding att sourced code was huge too.
It wasn't complete but it was enough. Sometimes, "enough" is what we need.
I had access to BSD tapes, ran vaxes, sun's and the like, I'd done my time on pdp11s. Being able to move that experience beyond the IBM pc-rt (there was a licenced BSD port to the romp chip) onto the emerging commodity hardware pc was amazing.
Maybe the real firelighter moment was the mmu enabled 386?