[TUHS] Last officially distributed and currently available BSD version

[clemc@ccc.com (Clem Cole)]

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On Sun, Oct 22, 2017 at 6:51 PM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Oct 22, 2017 1:39 AM, "Will Senn" <will.senn at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> [...]
> What is the last bootable and installable media, officially distributed by
> Berkeley?
>
> Is that image currently publicly accessible?
>
> What is the closest version, that is currently available, that would match
> the os described in "The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating
> System"?
>
>
> Probably one of the best ways to get questions about installation media
> answered is to simply email Kirk McKusick. He's a really nice guy and will
> probably give you an answer pretty quickly.
>
> That said, of the three distributions you mentioned, bootable/installable
> media only existed for 4.4BSD (also called the "encumbered" distribution).
> -Lite and -Lite2 were "reference distributions."
>
​Right.....​





> It didn't take *too* much work to get -Lite working, but it wasn't
> something that ran out of the box (or more properly, off of the tape).
>
​Pretty much, the idea was that if you have 4.3tahoe or reno system
somewhere, it could build 4.4lite assuming you supplied the few missing
files (which were generally available/findable/reasonably easy to intuit.​




> The original idea was to release 4.4BSD-encumbered to Unix source
> licensees, and at the same time publish 4.4BSD-Lite sans the redacted bits
> as an open source distribution.
>
​Exactly....​  And *lite* would fork off the Academic oriented NetBSD
releases with the academic community doing the support for each system.

My understanding was that the reference hardware at Berkeley was 68030- and
> 68040-based HP 9000 machines,
>
​Sounds right... I thought the encumbered bits worked on CCI, Vaxen (and
possibly SUN1s with the *10 upgrade boards), although might not have been
tested as thoroughly as earlier CSRG releases.


​The 386 bits were the sources of a great deal of issue between CSRG and
Jolitiz.  I was friends with all of the protagonists in that drama so I'm
going to try to be careful what I say here.

There was an 'encumbered' 386 distribution on the ftp site for a long time
although installation was definitely experts only (as I said, I helped with
the original disk support if you read the DDJ articles).  And the spurce of
my previous comments on this mailing list that if you knew about it, you
could get it

These bits are basically the pre-FreeBSD starting point.  FWIW: back in the
day, I had it the running on a Wyse 32:16 for a number of years, and might
still have a backup of it on 1/4" QIC tape; but the HW started to get flaky
and FreeBSD superseded it on other HW and it was not supported.​ I had kept
the boot image around as a reference for a book I was working on at the
time; but eventually just switched to using FreeBSD as the 4.4 'definition'
as it was good enough for what we were doing then.
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