All,
I did my research on this, but it's still a bit fuzzy (why is it
that people's memories from 40 years ago are so malleable?).
1. What are y'all's recollections regarding BSD 4.1's releases,
vis a vis the VAX. In McKusick's piece, Twenty Years of Berkeley
Unix, I get one perspective, and from Sokolov's Quasijarus
project, I get quite another. In terms of popularity and in terms
of stable performance, what say you? Was 4.1 that much better than
4BSD? Was 4.1as obsolete immediately as McKusick says? 4.1b sounds
good with FFS, was it? 4.1c's the last pre 4.2 release, but it
sounds like it was nearly a beta version of 4.2...
2. Sokolov implies that the CSRG mission started going off the
rails with the 4.3/4.3BSD-Tahoe and it all went pear shaped with
the 4.3-Reno release, and that Quasijarus puts the mission back on
track, is that so?
Bluntly, no. Sokolov fell deeply into the nostalgia trap, and combined it with a revolutionary zeal that was off-putting at best. As far as I know, it was never more than one individual's project, and boasts of reclaiming the mantle of CSRG and BSD are grossly exaggerated. The world changed, and Unix moved in a different direction to accommodate; there's really no going back.
3. I've gotten BSD 4.2 and BSD 4.3 releases built from tape and
working very well. I just can't decide whether to go back to one of
the 4.x releases (hence question 1), or go get Quasijarus0c -
thoughts on why one might be more interesting than another?
Quasijarus is like 4.3 with some bug fixes and enhancements. If you want to run something like 4.3 in an emulator, it's not bad; I'm running it for a ham radio project (just for fun) and it's Y2K compliant and seems reliable.
4. Is Quasijarus0c end of the line for VAX 4.xBSD? Why does tuhs
only have Quasijarus0 and 0a, was there something wrong with 0b and
0c?
Well, no. Both OpenBSD and NetBSD ported back to the VAX, but the OpenBSD effort has ended due to lack of hardware and interest. It appears that NetBSD is still being actively developed on the VAX, however, so it's possible to get a "modern" 4.4BSD derived system on that architecture.
5. Has anyone unearthed an original 4.1 tape, or is Haertel's
reconstruction of the 1981 tape 1 release as close as it gets?
For the fifth time today this reminded me that I wanted to find my images from Kirk's CD collection and move them over to another machine. Sigh.
- Dan C.