[ Thanks to Rob
Kennedy for this link. ]
“FreeBSD has its roots way back to 1977 when UC Berkeley sought
to create the world’s first Free Unix system. Back then Unix was so
expensive that unless you were willing to shell out thousands if
not tens of thousands of dollars you would be stuck with a huge
paperweight. So began BSD, the Berkeley Software Distribution of
Unix. Throughout the 1970’s and early 80’s BSD brought about a lot
of important enhancements to UNIX including TCP/IP, Process
Management, and a lot of things most UNIX people take for granted.
BSD advanced UNIX in more ways than any other flavor of UNIX ever
did.”
“In the 1980’s a new phenomenon was sweeping the nation, the
world’s first real protected mode processor from Intel called the
386. What this meant was that an affordable machine was capable of
real time multi processing, which is pretty much what Unix needs.
This lead to 386BSD, the world’s first Intel based UNIX and it
would be free. In the early 1990’s AT&T, the original developer
of UNIX, bought BSD from Berkeley and sued everyone using the Net/2
code, the TCP/IP stack used by BSD at the time. This lawsuit
dragged out for years and almost destroyed BSD forever, but BSD
survived.”