“Walnut Creek CDROM sells a lot of CD-ROMs, but it gives away
even more data. Specifically, anyone who has Internet access is
free to log into wcarchive (ftp.cdrom.com) and start
downloading…”
“… Because FTP archives don’t do a lot of thinking, wcarchive
doesn’t need a massive cluster of CPUs. In fact, it gets by with a
single 200-MHz P6 Pentium Pro…”
“…The system software is rather prosaic: a copy of FreeBSD,
supplemented by home-grown FTP mirroring and server code. Because
of the massive hardware support, the software “only” needs to keep
the I/O going in an efficient and reliable manner…”
“… Unlike Linux, FreeBSD is derived from the Berkeley Unix
code that forms the foundation for most commercial Unix
variants…”