"The first free Unix-like operating system available on the IBM
PC was 386BSD, of which Linus Torvalds said in 1993: "If 386BSD had
been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never
have happened."
"386BSD was a direct descendant of Bill Joy's Berkeley Software
Distribution, which was the core of SunOS and other proprietary
Unix distributions. 386BSD and the patchkit for the port to the
Intel chip formed the basis for FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, which
have carried the torch for BSD and open source Unix to this
day.
"Lars Wirzenius, a student friend of Linus Torvalds, recalled:
"FreeBSD didn't exist then. 386BSD did, but it wouldn't have worked
on my computer, since it required a 387 co-processor. I used SCO
Xenix from fall 1991 to spring or summer of 1992, until Linux
matured enough to be a usable environment for writing code."
