[pups] History of 2 BSD

[msokolov@ivan.Harhan.ORG (Michael Sokolov)]

Mario Premke <premke at ess-wowi.de> wrote:

> but I wonder when the step from
> 16bit to 32bit was made in BSD.

It was not made in BSD.  It was made at Ma Bell: the step from V7 to 32V (VAX
port of V7).  The first Berkeley kernel, 3BSD, was based on 32V and ran on the
VAX.  (1BSD and 2BSD were distributions of userland utilities and had no kernel.
Users added those utilities to their existing V6 or V7 systems.)

> Was 2BSD only running on the PDP-11, or
> was it ported to other architectures as well?

2BSD was a collection of Berkeley's userland utilities like ex and csh and as
such not tied to any particular architecture.  While most people used those
utilities on V6 and V7 systems (PDP-11), there is no reason why you couldn't
compile them under 32V (VAX), or on the Interdata port, or whatever.

Don't confuse 2BSD with 2.xBSD, though.  The latter came much much later (after
4BSD) and was a backport of some 4BSD features to PDP-11.  That one does have a
kernel, it's the V7 kernel with some 4BSD bits backported to it.  It's what
evolutionary biologists call reverse evolution.

> What architecture were the
> 32bit versions developed on in the beginning?

VAX.

MS