44 lines
2.2 KiB
Text
44 lines
2.2 KiB
Text
<!-- $Id: history.sgml,v 1.1 1995-05-10 22:12:01 jfieber Exp $ -->
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<!-- The FreeBSD Documentation Project -->
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<sect><heading>A brief history of FreeBSD</heading>
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<p><em>Contributed by &a.jkh;</em>.
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The FreeBSD project was started somewhere in the early part of 1992 as
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an outgrowth of the "Unofficial 386BSD Patchkit" by the patchkit's
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last 3 coordinators: Nate Williams, Jordan Hubbard and Rod Grimes.
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David Greenman and Julian Elischer were also lurking in the background
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around this time, though they didn't come fully into the project until
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a month or two after it was more or less officially launched. The
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original working title of the project was also "386BSD 0.5" or "386BSD
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Interim", a reference to the fact that the original goal was to
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produce an intermediate snapshot of 386BSD.
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386BSD was Bill Jolitz's operating system, which had been up to
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that point suffering rather severely from neglect, a consequence
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of which was to cause the patchkit to swell ever more
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uncomfortably with each passing day. The 3 ex-patchkit
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coordinators were all in agreement that the patchkit had to die.
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It was rapidly outliving its usefulness, and it would be a far
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easier thing to simply do another 386BSD release with all patches
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applied and a number of its aging utilities updated.
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These plans came to a rude halt when Bill Jolitz suddenly decided
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to withdraw his sanction from the project. It didn't take the
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team members long to decide that the goal remained worthwhile
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even without Bill's support, and so they adopted the name
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"FreeBSD", which was coined by David Greenman.
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Once it also became clear that the project was on the road to
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perhaps even becoming a reality, Jordan Hubbard contacted Walnut
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Creek CDROM with an eye towards improving FreeBSD's distribution
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channels to those many unfortunates without easy access to the
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Internet. Walnut Creek CDROM not only supported the idea of
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distributing FreeBSD on CD, but went so far as to provide the
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project with a machine to work on and a fast Internet connection.
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Without Walnut Creek CDROM's almost unprecidented degree of faith
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in what was, at the time, a completely unknown project, it is
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very unlikely that FreeBSD would have gotten as far, as fast, as
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it has today.
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