Date: 06 Oct 2002 22:50:43 -0700 From: swear@attbi.com (Gary W. Swearingen) To: Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@ofug.org> Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Congrats to Brett Glass for new BSD history article Message-ID: <pqn0pq7q6k.0pq@localhost.localdomain> In-Reply-To: <xzp3crj113r.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no> References: <wq65wq6erq.5wq@localhost.localdomain> <xzp3crj113r.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no>
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Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@ofug.org> writes: > swear@attbi.com (Gary W. Swearingen) writes: > > Though the B.S.D. long contained (some) "free" Berkely code, I don't > > think it's fair to try to get people to consider the B.S.D. as having > > initially been free, even if it was licensed to some schools for no cost. > > BSD was always free. It started out as a distribution of free > software (not a complete OS) which IIRC included a Pascal compiler, vi > and curses, all written at UCB and 100% free. It didn't become an OS > until a few years later. Quotes snipped out of context a couple of weeks later can be embarassing. I'm suprised that I said "initially" instead of "always", as I distinctly remember acknowledging the possibility that B.S.D. was, for a short time, not a complete OS (eg, just patches, etc.) and asking if anyone knew. Anyway, "a few years" is consistent with this item from http://comp-hist.sourceforge.net/comp-hist-0.9.2.html#1bsd 1BSD Type : OS Date : 1978 Mar 9 Reference : Quarter Century of UNIX by Peter Salus, pg 142 Code taken from : Unix Time-Sharing System,\n 6th Edition since http://www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/sharing.html says Dennis Ritchie was at Berkely 1976-7. It also quotes him as saying (time period not mentioned, but easily guessed): "The contractors got the UNIX licenses from Bell Labs, but they got the BSD software from Berkeley." Sounds like B.S.D. was always free, except after about Mar'78. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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