Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 14:42:27 -0800 (PST) From: Julian Elischer <julian@whistle.com> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD early days... (fwd) Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.95.990222143234.7463M-100000@current1.whistle.com>
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I was asked to write a bit on my memories..
so having done it, I figured it needed to be shared out and maybe those
there might comment. (also tell me how to spell cgd's name)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 13:01:22 -0800 (PST)
From: Julian Elischer <julian@whistle.com>
To: Gianmarco Giovannelli <gmarco@scotty.masternet.it>
Cc: Amancio Hasty <hasty@rah.star-gate.com>,
Julian Elischer <julian@whistle.com>
Subject: Re: FreeBSD early days...
In 1990 I started working for TFS, a branch of TRW, a large american
company with fingers in many industries. The section I was working for was
doing back-end processing systems for banks and similar financial
institutions. As part of these systems they needed small unix-based
workstations with specialised hardware. We chose to use MACH 2.5 which was
based upon BSD4.3 for much of it's userland and kernel functions. In 1991
I attended a course at UC Berkeley on BSD4.4 Kernel internals (taught by
Kirk McKusick). At that course, Chris Demitriou (spelling?) brought in a
copy (On floppies) of the just released 386BSD 0.1 system which had been
brought to life by Bill Jolitz. Since MACH 2.5 required a licence, I found
the ftp site for 386BSD and downloded a copy for myself to play with. I
discoverd that MACH 2.5 and 386BSD used the same filesystem so I was able
to build a machine that could run them both with shared filesystems. This
allowed me to very quickly have a fully functionning system with a lot of
abilities that I could not get from the fledgling 396BSD on it's own.
At around that time I had written a SCSI system for MACH2.5. It was
modular and had drivers for several adapters, and several device types. It
was pretty easy work (about 2 weeks) to port this to 386BSD, and TFS
allowed me to release it to the BSD world (via CMU). To make this work I
also needed to provide bootblocks that could use SCSI disks. I started
with the PD MACH bootblocks and rewrote sections of them to understand the
BSD disklabels etc. These bootblocks used the BIOS and could thus boot of
anything the BIOS understood, including SCSI drives. This was a vast
improvement over the previous BSD bootblocks that specifically drove the
hardware of the IDE/ESDI interface. They also allowed the user to type the
name of analternate kernel or analternate root device, a lifesaver for
people testing new kernels.
Once we had a system capable of running on more hardware, the problem
became that we didn't have a way for developers to co-operate, except for
the newsgroup. I got permission from TFS to place a large PC with (at the
time) a lot of memory and disk space, on the outside of the TFS firewall,
directly attached to our T1. I then gave accounts on this machine to
anyone who's name I recognised as being a developer, and kept that machine
running on a 7x24 basis, with backups and some security. All users were
actually in a chroot partition (though most of them never realised that).
At one stage we had over 400 users on that machine with an average of 10
to 15 active at any time. This became the 386BSD reference machine. It's
name was ref.tfs.com. (The name still exists now but is the TFS public ftp
server and runs solaris).
At this time there was what was called the "Patch kit". The patch kit
was an "official" (ha!) set of patches that when applied to a 386BSD
standard system, produced a system that was approximatly at the state that
ref.tfs.com was at. Terry Lambert, Rod Grimes, and Chris Demitriou (sp?)
were names that I remember being associated with the patchkit. (possibly
also Nate Williams and Jordan hubbard). Charlse Hannum and some of the
(later NetBSD) crew were also pretty visible. It was pretty common
practice at that time to start with 386BSD0.1, add the patchkit, and then
pull over new changes from ref.
Some time in 1992 NetBSD formed as a separate organisation due to
differences of opinion with Bill Jolitz. Some of us felt that the split
was bad and decided to TRY maintain a position that was compatible with
that of Bill Jolitz, however Bill at that time decided tha the distraction
of being mentor to the entire group was stopping him from getting anything
done, and decided that he needed to retire from "public life" to work on a
new version of 386BSD (the fabled 0.2). Shortly after this his father died
which left him with a lot of work to do with his father's affairs and
basically took him right out of the picture. He later returned with a new
version of 386BSD but by then things had progressed too far with NetBSD
and by then FreeBSD for it to keep the mainstream position. Bill had some
good ideas for changes in the kernel some of which are still not
implemented anywhere that I know of.
In 1993 (I think) Those of us that had been hoping to keep working with
Bill eventually had to give up due to Bills dissappearance, and as Bill
had a trademark on 386BSD which he wished to use for some books etc. we
had to find another name. FreeBSD was chosen. Net BSD had chosen their
name as they had a primary goal of porting BSD to many platforms and
wanted to get rid of the 386 limitation. FreeBSD on the other hand wanted
to concentrate on where the greatest market was. Thus it maintained a
strong 386 basis. Only in 1998 did a port for any other hardware actually
emerge.
With the emergence of FreeBSD, came the connection with Walnut Creak
cdrom. They hired Rod Grimes to ride hurd on it full time, and the new
group decided that a CVS server was the way to go for tracking the
software. Thus focus shifted from ref.tfs.com to Freefall.cdrom.com
which later also became freefall.freebsd.org.
Rod was (still is) a skydiver and thus the names of some of the machines..
freefall, and thud. After Rod left to persue his own businesses, those who
followed didn't keep up the skydiving references.
I left TFS in March 1993. When I left, ref became hard to maintain,
and fell out of general use. It's functions were generally switched to
freefall, and it was shut down sometime in June I believe after a
catastrophic disk crash. It was rebuilt when I returned on contract later
that year, but by then it had returned to the position of my personal
sandbox.
hope that helps
(gee I should post this somewhere..)
do you mind if I mail this to 'chat' or something?
julian
On Mon, 22 Feb 1999, Gianmarco Giovannelli wrote:
> At 01.10 22/02/99 -0800, you wrote:
> >You can also ask Julian Elisher julian@whistle.com -- FreeBSD or 386bsd I
> >forgot which
> >really got a boost by allowing hackers from all over the world to hack on the
> >system 8)
>
> Hello Julian, a friend of you :-) said you have a lot of spare time and
> wants to tell me what happens in these days ...
>
> Can you said me some stories, little things, rebus of that days... I am
> writing my final thesis and I a need to know some little background of the
> period on FreeBSD and UNIX in general...
>
> Btw I am now serious , don't feel you obliged, but if you wants I'll be
> very happy to hear something from you :-)
>
>
>
>
> Best Regards,
> Gianmarco Giovannelli , "Unix expert since yesterday"
> http://www.giovannelli.it/~gmarco
> http://www2.masternet.it
>
>
>
>
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