Health Check: FreeBSD – “The unknown giant”

“FreeBSD is the most accessible and popular of the BSDs, has
code at the heart of Darwin and Apple’s OS X, and has powered some
of the more successful sites on the Web, including Hotmail,
Netcraft and Yahoo!, which before the rise of Google was the
busiest site on the internet.

“FreeBSD rose from the ashes of 386BSD, the original effort to
port BSD to the Intel chip, and claims a code lineage that reaches
back to Bill Joy’s Berkeley Software Distribution of the late
seventies. The 386BSD port was begun in 1989 by Bill and Lynne
Jolitz, and was destined to be the original free Unix-like
operating system for the IBM PC. The first public release of 386BSD
(Version 0.0) was on St. Patrick’s Day, 1991, accompanied by a
series of articles in Dr Dobbs journal, which documented the
process.

“The first functional release of 386BSD was Version 0.1, which
was released on Bastille Day, 1992.

“FreeBSD emerged in 1993, after the self-imposed task of
supporting 386BSD on their own had proved too much for Bill and
Lynne Jolitz. The patchkit which had been the underpinning for the
BSD port to the 386 was revived and became the basis for the first
FreeBSD release.”

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