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BSDs- History and Use Thereof Past and Present.

Caluser2000

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I thought I would start a thread on BSD Unix, including history and the use of past to the present.

i pasted a thread on my attempt to install a few current versions on my AMDK6-2 400 with a MM2 video card with 4megs if vram. That system has 256megs of ram. Never being one to totally give up on anything I have been dipping my toes in the BSD pond. I installed Open BSD on a socket 7 mobo with ceramic P166mmx I'm testing and apart from not picking up the seral mouse everything went swimmingly. The video card on this is an ASUS pci card with with S3Trio 64V2/DX chip set and 1meg of vram along with 64megs of system ram I'll work on the mouse issue even if it is just plug in a pci usb v2 card and usb mouse.

I'd imagine a thread dedicated to BSD would be useful for the younger folk getting in to the hobby of vintage kit. And of course all you oldies who used it decades ago to get work done

Now over to you my vcfed friends......

Edit-Yip usb mouse picked up fine in Xorg.
 
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Oh, BSD goes back some time. My first exposure was around 1983 on a VAX 11/750. 4.2BSD, if memory serves. Somewhere in my stash, I have an 800 bpi 9 track tape from BSD running on Ernie. ("Ernie Co-VAX") at Berkeley.

FreeBSD.org said:
2.3. System identification

The system identification is a moniker attached to the system, and often the machine on which the system is to run. For example, at Berkeley we have machines named Ernie (Co-VAX), Kim (No-VAX), and so on. The system identifier selected is used to create a global C ``#define'' which may be used to isolate system dependent pieces of code in the kernel. For example, Ernie's Varian driver used to be special cased because its interrupt vectors were wired together. The code in the driver which understood how to handle this non-standard hardware configuration was conditionally compiled in only if the system was for Ernie.

I suspect that one would have to explain the puns to many nowadays...
 
My first BSD exposure was the Dual VAX 11/780 (the first one) on Purdue's ECN in 1984. George Goble was able to procure a second CPU card from DEC (claiming the one they had died, IIRC), and because it was running BSD with source, he added a spin lock around the kernel entry points to get it running with two processors. It did add some life to the VAX, but hundreds of engineering students pounding away on their projects pretty much brought it to its knees.
 
My first experience was with 4.1BSD on an 11/750 at college with SunOS 2/3/4 being the bulk of my experience using BSD lineage systems, up through NetBSD 5.1 on my Alpha AXPpci/33.
 
MicroSoft used the BSD tcp/ip network stack in their early NT range. Apples OSX hybrid kernel is Mach/BSD. So BSDs have been a big influence in the IT field since it was originally developed :)
 
My first BSD use was SunOS 4, on SPARCstation 1, 1+ and 2 machines at work. For home use, it was NetBSD on the DECstation 5000/120, in 1995, where I assisted with the MIPSel porting project.

I still love NetBSD, and use it regularly.

- Alex
 
i'm a bit younger, my first home BSD was a late openBSD 3.x, we had some freeBSD servers at my first tech job ~2008 or so, and i managed those from time to time. my sun ultra60 runs netBSD since it's a lot more capable than available solaris releases, and quite a lot less bloated, too- i've also used it on alphas and VAXen. my last job was pretty much exclusively a freeBSD shop for quite some time, interestingly enough!
 
they are (netflix will attest to that) but it's interesting insofar as you don't see them used that extensively that often, i think we had fewer than 15 linux and windows servers combined in the first few years i was there :)
 
In 2000-2001 I worked for a startup that employed a number of high-profile NetBSD contributors. (Our magic-and-ultimately-failed, uhm, "e-commerce optimization appliance", was built on NetBSD.) I developed a rather intense, er, "Love-Hate relationship" with NetBSD as a result of that experience. A somewhat amusing observation was how stoked the developers were about OS X using NetBSD for much of the userland code; about half a dozen guys bought PowerBook G4s the day they were released in March(?) 2001. I remember them sitting around poking at the terminals of their new (and mostly useless) OS X 10.0 installs and running "strings" against the system binaries, cheering when they found NetBSD copyright strings.

(For a long time since then I felt obligated, for old time's sake, to keep some kind of semi-obscure chunk of hardware around to fire up once in a blue moon and build the latest NetBSD on; the last victim was a Sparc Ultra 10. It's been quite a few years, maybe I should drag it out of the garage and see if it still works. It was kind of an exciting time the last I was playing with it because they'd just finally gotten Xorg to work on the Sparc64 platform; that lagged for a long time.)

The next place I worked, coincidentally or not, was a FreeBSD shop, which likewise had enough, er, "advocates" for the OS around that FreeBSD wasn't just for our appliance product, we had to "eat our own dogfood" with it everywhere possible. So, yeah, name an infrastructure "thing" and I've built it on FreeBSD; mail servers, print servers, database servers, firewalls, network routers....

Just using Linux for at least some of those things probably would have made more sense, but, eh, give the people what they want, I guess.
 
Oh, BSD goes back some time. My first exposure was around 1983 on a VAX 11/750. 4.2BSD, if memory serves. Somewhere in my stash, I have an 800 bpi 9 track tape from BSD running on Ernie. ("Ernie Co-VAX") at Berkeley.



I suspect that one would have to explain the puns to many nowadays...
Is it possible to image the tape and upload it to Archive.org? It would be interesting to see it.

- Geoff
 
I've imaged it somewhere. I'll cast around in my stacks and see if I can find the file. IIRC, mostly it's newsgroup sort of stuff, but I could be mistaken.
 
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