Re: [TUHS] BSD 4.1, 4.1x, Quasijarus, and 4.3x

[Hans Rosenfeld <rosenfeld@grumpf.hope-2000.org>]

On Tue, Feb 01, 2022 at 03:34:53PM -0600, Will Senn wrote:
> 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?

Well, thats just his opinion. You can still read all about it here:
https://ifctfvax.superglobalmegacorp.com/

> 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?

IIRC 4.3-Tahoe was the first to support running on MicroVAX II, III
and later systems based on the CVAX chip and the QBus. But getting it
installed on one of these was a pain to say the least. The main reason
was that it required the use of disk labels on the directly-attached
MSCP disks commonly found on these systems, but it lacked a standalone
utility for creating them during installation.

From my recollection Michael made a few small improvements to what he
found in 4.3-Tahoe, and a standalone disklabel utility may or may not
have been one of them.

I do remember that when I first installed 4.3-Tahoe (Or was it
Quasijarus 0b?) on a real MicroVAX II about 20 years ago, I had to create
the disklabels with NetBSD 1.5, which apparently were still reasonably
compatible back then.
 
> 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?

It's basically just yet another branch off the Unix family tree,
originating at 4.3BSD-Tahoe and not going very far. He had big plans to
support most later MicroVAX models, but apparently that never
materialized.


Hans


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