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Date: Mon, 11 Aug 1997 17:49:26 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Marco Molteni <molter@logic.it>
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To: Albert Llanes <llanes@technologist.com>
cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: A short UNIX history. (WAS: Why FreeBSD over Linux?)
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On Mon, 11 Aug 1997, Albert Llanes wrote:

> Why should I use FreeBSD over Linux?

You shouldn't. Ever heard of DOS ? ;-)

> Which was first, FreeBSD or Linux?

Once upon a time (around the sixties), there were MIT, Bell Labs and
General Electric; they dreamed of MULTICS. Then MULTICS fizzled and Bell 
Labs gave up the project. 

One day at Bell Labs Ken Thompson saw a dusty DEC PDP-7 and said:
"let's write an OS in assembly". Brian Kernighan saw the dust around
the room and said: "Ken, call it UNICS". UNIX was born. It was the epoch.
Shortly after Dennis Ritchie joined the effort. 
Obviously UNIX wasn't enough for Thompson, so he invented a 
high-level language, B, to rewrite the OS; but B failed.
So Ritchie said: "hey, Ken, try my language! I'll call it C"
(Yes, then come Stroustrup and C++, but this is another tale ;-)
So Thompson and Ritchie rewrote UNIX in C.
After AT&T, the parent of Bell Labs, licenced the UNIX source to 
universities for a small fee.

And now comes into play the University of California at Berkley. 
Partly funded by DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Project Agency), 
Berkley gave birth to 1BSD (First Berkley Software Distribution).
Later BSD releases introduced virtual memory, paging, a new file
system and networking, namely TCP/IP. Ah, yes, I forgot vi!

The rest is recent history. ;-)

Marco