386BSD

From ArticleWorld

386BSD is an x86-based Unix operating system derived from the BSD Unix variant. 386BSD is also known as Jolix, by the name of its two main authors, Lynne Jolitz and William Jolitz, bother Berkeley alumni at the time.

Both Lynne Jolitz and William Jolitz had considerable experience with BSD. William had used 2.8 and 2.9 BSD extensively, and Lynne had contributed code to several Berkeley projects in the 1980s.

History

The port began in 1989 and the first public release was 4.3BSD NET/2. This was an incomplete release, which wasn't operational either, and much of the code was actually owned by the University of California. The first version, 0.0, was released in March 1992, but it was basically unusable. Only with version 0.1, released in July 1992, did 386BSD become usable.

William and Lynne Jolitz documented all of the porting process in a series of articles which they published in Dr. Dobbs Journal.

The development process began to change radically when 386BSD was completely working. William and Lynne assigned research goals to the project, which was something that many users were not happy about, and neither were the developers, as Linux was growing rapidly. FreeBSD was the first consequence of this, and, as more and more developers were becoming frustrated with tying 386BSD to the x86 architecture, some of them decided to split and start working on what was to become NetBSD.

The development of 386BSD continued though, and, in 1994, a final release (1.0) was made. This was distributed by Dr. Dobb's Journal, on a CD-ROM, because of its size (600 MB). This was the best selling CD-ROM until 1997, as the 1.0 BSD contained a new kernel and included many changes that were suggested, but never attempted by the Berkeley University.

Present

At this moment, 386BSD is available for non-commercial purposes from jolix.com. The effective public releases stopped in 1997, since much of the code was actually present in other operating systems anyway. Several ideas were introduced by 386BSD and can be found in today's modern operating systems: role-based security, modular kernel design, ring buffers and self-ordered configuration.