Date: Fri, 5 Jul 2002 10:55:52 -0400 (EDT) From: Jerry McAllister <jerrymc@clunix.cl.msu.edu> To: geniejax@worldnet.att.net (Eugenia Henry) Cc: jerrymc@msu.edu (Jerry McAllister), freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Definition Message-ID: <200207051455.g65Etq003053@clunix.cl.msu.edu> In-Reply-To: <000e01c223b3$3e557020$9a5b4d0c@pavilion> from "Eugenia Henry" at Jul 04, 2002 04:33:45 PM
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> > What do the initials BSD stand for? > They stand for Berkeley Software Distribution. Very loose history: The BSD family of UNIXen began when the computer department at University of California at Berkeley took the primitive UNIX from AT&T/Bell Labs and made more complete OS and began to distribute it - which was followed by AT&T discovering it might have some value and sueing them - which was then followed by years of court time - which was resolved by the Berkeley people completely rewriting any part of the system that had AT&T code to remove all trace of AT&T - and eventually put that all in the open-software/freeware world - and various flavors of BSD such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, netBSD and PicoBSD flourished. More accurate and complete details can be found in a number of publications. In the meantime AT&T tried to head this off by starting a different family of UNIX which became sVr4 (System Five, Release four) and recruited some other companies to get on their proprietary bandwagon and get a standards committee going to help legitimize it which spawned Solaris (Sun) and AIX (IBM) and SGI sort of tried to do both BSD and sVr4 with its IRIX. Eventually an open-software/almost-freeware version of an sVr4 kernal got going called LINUX which became packaged in various flavors such as RedHat and Debian, etc. So, was that more than you wanted to hear? ////jerry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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