Subj : Re: NetBSD 10
To   : deon
From : tenser
Date : Wed Apr 03 2024 08:05:33

On 02 Apr 2024 at 09:12a, deon pondered and said...
 
 de> I've never got into the BSD's...
 de> 
 de> Tried them over the years, and do use truenas (also used pfsense,
 de> opnsense in the past) [- which I know is freebsd, not netbsd].
 de> 
 de> Always wondered what the difference was between them - freebsd, netbsd
 de> and openbsd. (I know one is heavily code security focused, but other
 de> than that...)

So, in the beginning was the GE645 and the Multics project.
And Multics was good.  But it was expensive and Bell Labs
dropped out of the project and went back to wandering in the
desert of batch systems.  Then the prophet ken made a bargain
with some acoustics people to use an obsolete PDP-7, and UNICS
was born.  The faithful gathered round and built a temple,
eventually being successful in proselytizing to management
to fund a PDP-11, and UNICS was moved to that machine, and
became Unix in the process.  Then the prophet ritchie came
in from the cold, and took some of the early writings of ken
and from those beget C, and Unix was reborn in its own image.
Then ken went on a pilgrimage to his alma mater, Berkeley,
and took Unix with him, wherefrom it was installed on a PDP-11
in Cory Hall.  Then, a few years later, lo, the great empire
DEC created a new vessel for computation, the VAX.  And a
VAX was sent to Bell Labs, and Unix was moved to it, and then
that was put on a tape (with a holy book titled, "32/V") and
that tape was sent to Berkeley, where the prophet joy and
some of his acolytes began assembling the cool programs they
had written and sending them out on tapes to anyone who wanted
a copy: the Berkeley Software Distribution (shells, editors,
and a Pascal system were on those early tables).  Thus, BSD was
born.

Many years passed, and BSD became both mighty and well-known,
with large representation on USENET.  Eventually, the VAX fell
from favor, but BSD went on.  Then it was that a wandering
heretic known as Bill Jolitz, together with his wife, Lynn,
ported BSD to the 80386 microprocessor, with the saga of this
adventure told in the pages of Dr Dobbs Journal.  Thus, 386BSD
was sent off into the world.

But it was buggy, and slow, and crashed a lot.  So people started
writing patchkits for it.  Jolitz, more a mendicant than a
preacher, was loathe to take these patches, so NetBSD and FreeBSD
both independently sprang up to carry forward the BSD way.  FreeBSD
was, "turning PCs into workstations" before it acquired, "The Power
to Serve."  NetBSD started cleaning up the BSD code and porting it
more widely (such as to the Alpha!).

But hark that, at this time, some of the acolytes from Berkeley
formed a company: BSDi, and released their own fork of 386BSD
called BSD/OS.  Their phone number was "1-800-ITS-UNIX".  However,
AT&T, which owned the rights to Unix, claimed vile heresy and
sent them commissars to the Bay Area to tell BSDi to knock it the
hell off.  This led to a lawsuit, at which point it was realized
that AT&T had taken a bunch of BSD code and copied it into System
V Unix while removing the copyright due to the Berkeley regency.
A countersuit was mounted.

As this wound through the courts, a Finnish programmer named Linus
Torvalds started a little project for his own education that he
called "Linux."  Everyone who wanted Unix at home but didn't want
to tango with lawyers started running that.

Finally, the great war between AT&T, BSDi, and UC Berkeley ended,
with no victors.  The descendants of 386BSD continued on, but UCB
itself stopped working on it (everyone involved having finally
graduated or gone on to a startup).

Then one day, Theo de Raadt, a world class flaming asshole, shouted
at someone in email to "stop ramming your cock down my throat" and
was kicked out of NetBSD.  In spite, he created his own project:
OpenBSD, that focused on security first and foremost.

Many years later, FreeBSD tried to do down a path of M:N scheduling
that is paved with treachery, and Matt Dillon forked off Dragonfly
to explore another route for kernel-level parallelism.

And that brings us to the present day: Linux won the Unix wars, the
BSDs are a shadow of their former selves.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
 * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

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