From: David Barto <david@kdbarto.org>
To: Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>
Cc: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question")
Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2020 10:09:55 -0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <7C45A7D2-1FE9-46F0-AA31-396671704214@kdbarto.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20200120180432.GJ28686@mcvoy.com>
On Jan 20, 2020, at 10:04 AM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 12:19:25PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
>> On Sun, Jan 19, 2020 at 10:52 PM George Michaelson <ggm@algebras.org> wrote:
>>
>>> It does me no credit, that I initially reacted very badly to 386BSD,
>>> and the initial {Net,Free,Open} situation.
>>>
>> First, be careful. What we sometimes call 386BSD as a 'release' started
>> just as a port of NET2 to the 386 based 'commodity' hardware platform. The
>> history is that in the late 1970s/early 80s Bill Jolitz was working for Nat
>> Semi and ported BSD 4.1, to a multibus based NS16032 board that NS had
>> built, which was similar to the Stanford University Network (SUN) terminal
>> what had a 68000. He eventually built a 'luggable' using that and updated
>> to the port to 4.2++. He (and Lynn I believe) started a company to sell
>> that hardware/software solution and for whatever reason, it did not really
>> take off.
>
> I know those Nat Semi chips very well, or did at the time. I so wanted to
> love those chips, the instruction set felt like whoever did the PDP-11
> did the 320xx chips. But they couldn't produce chips without bugs and
> that killed them. It's a crying shame, I liked the instruction set
> WAY better than the VAX. The VAX seemed really messing compared to
> the PDP-11, the 320xx chips seemed clean. Might be rose colored
> glasses but that's my memory.
My memory as well. A friend and I got ahold of the complete set of chips
and started to build out the hardware for a Unix box. We got most of the
way there too, and then the odd quirks started showing up. We tracked
some of them to our layout and the others to the NS chips. Then we gave
it up as a “ah, it would have been nice if only” project.
David
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-01-20 18:22 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 54+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-01-17 16:01 [TUHS] On the origins of Linux - "an academic question" Arrigo Triulzi
2020-01-17 16:53 ` Warner Losh
2020-01-17 17:08 ` Arrigo Triulzi
2020-01-17 17:25 ` Brantley Coile
2020-01-17 19:59 ` Arno Griffioen
2020-01-18 3:50 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2020-01-18 4:19 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question") Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2020-01-18 15:25 ` Larry McVoy
2020-01-18 16:19 ` reed
2020-01-19 2:49 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2020-01-19 3:12 ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2020-01-19 3:47 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD Warren Toomey
2020-01-19 3:51 ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2020-01-19 3:58 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question") Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2020-01-19 13:25 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2020-01-19 13:48 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-20 3:32 ` Greg A. Woods
2020-01-20 3:51 ` George Michaelson
2020-01-20 3:59 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD Jon Forrest
2020-01-20 17:19 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question") Clem Cole
2020-01-20 17:49 ` Warner Losh
2020-01-20 19:00 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-20 18:04 ` Larry McVoy
2020-01-20 18:09 ` David Barto [this message]
2020-01-20 18:34 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD Arthur Krewat
2020-01-20 19:18 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question") Clem Cole
2020-01-20 19:46 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-01-20 20:15 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-21 6:58 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD Lars Brinkhoff
2020-01-21 14:30 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-21 17:17 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-01-21 17:22 ` Warner Losh
2020-01-21 17:25 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-01-21 18:43 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-21 18:44 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-21 19:14 ` Warner Losh
2020-01-21 20:27 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-22 0:14 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question") Greg A. Woods
2020-01-21 0:44 ` Bakul Shah
2020-01-20 19:09 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2020-01-20 19:51 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-20 23:04 ` Greg A. Woods
2020-01-21 0:13 ` Warner Losh
2020-01-21 23:45 ` Greg A. Woods
2020-01-18 15:30 ` [TUHS] On the origins of Linux - "an academic question" Larry McVoy
2020-01-17 23:11 ` Andrew Warkentin
2020-01-17 23:20 ` Rob Pike
2020-01-17 23:38 ` Brantley Coile
2020-01-18 0:23 ` Wesley Parish
2020-01-18 15:35 [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question") Jason Stevens
2020-01-18 15:49 ` Larry McVoy
2020-01-19 14:17 Noel Chiappa
2020-01-19 20:49 ` Nemo Nusquam
2020-01-19 16:05 Noel Chiappa
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