On Mon, 12 Sep 2005, Shigeki UNO wrote:
> I like this kind of story and would like to read some others.

Back in the pre-1.1 days (1993?), I was doing a PhD and I was introduced 
to Unix for the first time (using Masscomp machines - anyone remember 
those?). It blew away Windows (or DOS as it was mainly then) and every 
other OS I'd used. I had an Acorn RiscPC and I wanted to run some form of 
Unix-alike on it. RiscBSD (which later became NetBSD/arm32) was very early 
on and not part of the NetBSD tree, but was the only option (interestingly 
RISCiX was a 4.3BSD OS written by Acorn for their older machines, but it 
wouldn't run on the RiscPC). Armed with about 40 floppies, I trudged 
elsewhere in the uni and downloaded it (a slow job!). Got it installed and 
I never looked back.

After the PhD, I decided that academia wasn't for me and so got a job at 
Acorn in tech support. The company then merged with Apple to become Acorn 
and Apple's sole provider to education in the UK. A new client came out 
which booted using bootp and NFS with no local storage. I took it and got 
it to boot from NetBSD. The company ran with this and we launched in 
January 1997 (using 1.2G IIRC). We sold these systems to schools all over 
the UK (so Apple UK were effectively selling BSD boxes into schools years 
before MacOS X). In 1999, Apple bought out the whole company and anything 
non-Apple got dumped. I took all the IPR and set up my own company to 
continue development. We rebranded it and moved to Intel hardware. 
NetBSD's single source tree and cross-platform ability meant this was very 
easy). We expanded the services it provided and to this day continue to 
sell Internet/security servers to schools throughout the UK (In fact, I'm 
currently typing this on such a machine out on site while their Windows 
server rebuilds after a crash). See http://www.netmanager.info/

We are also heavily into Citrix and thin-client computing. We sell a 
product based on NetBSD which converts pretty much any old PC into a 
centrally-managed thin-client. This is installed in the hundreds at some 
schools. We are also due to launch our own range of thin-client hardware 
at the end of the month which is, once again, NetBSD based (this time 
running 3.0_BETA and waiting for a full release!). http://www.thinit.info/

I like to think that in our small way, we are introducing people to NetBSD 
(even if they don't see much of it). Many tens of thousands of pupils and 
teachers throughout the UK use NetBSD every day because of us.

-- 
Stephen