Re: [TUHS] 386BSD released

["Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 10:33:52PM -0400, risner@stdio.com wrote:
> 
> I have repetively seen discussion suggesting Linux was available first, but
> having directly worked for a university at the time installing SunOS, AT&T
> SVR3, and other old OS’s, we welcomed the concept of switching from AT&T
> SVR3 on 386 machines to 386BSD. We’d probably have welcomed Linux if anyone
> in the department knew about it.

To be fair, Linux in 1991 was a very primitive affair; no TCP/IP, no X
Windows.  We had C-Kermit, and we had emacs, and we had basic shell
utilities and a compiler.  But not much else.  So I doubt it would
have been a good replacement for SVR3.

The big difference was that Linus accepted patches, and turned around
new releases *quickly* while Jolitz apparently sat on patches until
the NetBSD and FreeBSD people finally lost patience and released a
fork with their patch sets in 1993.  So while Linux in 1992 was
probably behind 386BSD from a feature perspective, its development
velocity was much faster.

I remember a friendly rivalry that I had with Bruce D. Evans in
Australia, who was working on the serial driver for FreeBSD, where we
would exchange tips and techniques for making the serial driver on our
respective OS's more CPU efficient.  (The metric was to see who could
most reduce the system overhead of the serial interrupt and tty layers
when running a C-Kermit file transfer over a pair of RS-232 ports
connected via a loopback cable.)  It was a lot of fun, and we both
gained a lot from the exchange of ideas, but finally, I came up with
an idea (flip buffers) that really reduced Linux's serial/tty
overhead, but which Bruce couldn't match in FreeBSD, because the
FreeBSD core team thought that clists were handed down from Mount
Olympus by the Gods of BSD, and making that kind of change in the tty
layer was tantamount to heresy.  Heh.

						- Ted