Subject: Re: Why did NetBSD and FreeBSD diverge?
To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
From: James Howard <howardjp@well.com>
List: netbsd-advocacy
Date: 01/19/2001 08:59:38
On Thu, 18 Jan 2001, Greg Lehey wrote:

> 14 July:  Bill Jolitz releases version 0.1 of 386BSD.
> 
> 	  At this point, BSD/386 was quite a usable system.  I was
> 	  running both Interactive UNIX/386, a System V.3.2
> 	  derivative, and BSD/386 0.3.3, and the BSD/386 was already
> 	  much more polished than Interactive.  By all accounts 386BSD
> 	  was still a disaster.  I once started trying to install it,
> 	  but didn't get very far.
> 
> Apr 1993: NetBSD 0.8 came out.
> 
> Dec 1993: FreeBSD 1.0 came out.

It's hard to find a specific date, but the NetBSD/mac68k history page
(http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/mac68k/history.html) says that somewhere
around here students at Virginia Tech had started porting to the Mac and
later merged those changes into NetBSD in time for the 0.8 release in
April of 1993.  Just looking at the timelines, it appears that NetBSD was
always pretty independent of 386BSD, but the NetBSD history says they took
cde from 386BSD for the Mac port.  Obviously, this was not part of hte
386BSD development effort.  Was this because Jolitz didn't care about
portability?  The name suggests it :)

Jamie