Date: Tue, 25 Mar 1997 08:10:19 -0600 (CST) From: Guy Helmer <ghelmer@cs.iastate.edu> To: David Greenman <dg@root.com> Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: BSD Anniversary Message-ID: <Pine.HPP.3.96.970325075327.29638A-100000@storm.cs.iastate.edu> In-Reply-To: <199703250450.UAA01048@root.com>
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On Mon, 24 Mar 1997, David Greenman wrote: > >It's been five years this month since FreeBSD's ancestor, 386BSD 0.0, hit > >the streets. Anyone remember how much fun it was to install? > > It was...challenging. Bill once commented to me "Anyone who was actually > able to successfully install 0.0 deserves a prize". It's been so long that > I've forgotten the details, but I seem to recall that you had to do everything > by hand with the distribution being a bunch of floppies that were all cat'd > together...and the supported hardware configuration was basically: pccons, > floppy, and wd controller. If you weren't a computer expert (especially with > low level details), you didn't have a snowball's chance. I installed it (if > you can call what had to be done as an "installation") on a 386SX-25 with > 4MBs of RAM. ...oh what fun THAT was. :-) <grin> I got 0.0 running on a 386DX-25 with a 300MB ESDI drive -- I mention the ESDI drive because 1) the controller translated the geometry [an intimate knowledge of disk geometry was necessary] and 2) the drive had bad spots, so it was difficult to install 0.0 on that disk (it was also hard to get FreeBSD 1.x installed on that disk...). 386BSD 0.1 on that 386 saved me from disaster (Ultrix on my sole MicroVAX II at the time wasn't stable enough to handle the load of supporting all Internet services for the university at which I worked). It was cool to see a 386 outperform a MicroVAX that cost 10 times as much :-) And I'm sorry I left your name (and John's) out of the list of thanks! Guy Helmer ghelmer@cs.iastate.edu
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