hehe

we mean good old 4.3-tahoe (and sometimes 4.3-reno) berkeley UNIX. 
why the repeated mention of it? cause it is blazing fast even on a slow 
VAX. yes, the virtual memory system is much more primitive- it is built 
directly on top of the VAX virtual memory system, and was in 4.3reno and 
4.4 replaced with the Mach VM system because the 4.3tahoe and older VM 
system was so vax-freidnly that it was a pain to port to anything else. 
however, 4.3tahoe is fast and lean largely because of two things: 
1, it predates POSIX by a year. so, theres none of the POSIX bloat in it. 
2, it has not systemV compatibility.
also, there are no shared libraries (which i think is a good thind, i 
think shared libraries are an abomination, a security and reliability 
disaster, and an administration pain in the ass, as well as plain ugly) 
and the VM system in general, while extremely VAX-specific, is quite 
zippy. you cant have things like mmap very easily at all, the way it is 
done, so there are some features that a lot of people commonly rely on 
now that are absent in 4.3, but in general, it is a perfectly good UNIX, 
one that i personally find very comfortable and a wonderful environment, 
its tiny, it's fast, and once you get the (now free) UNIX source license 
from SCO, you can try it out yourself, too! i'm one of the distributors 
of the PUPS archive, so once you get your license, i can send you a CD or 
tape of it. 

(btw gunther, im making another try for your ultrix tape, i havent forgotten)
I like and use NetBSD largely because it is the closest thing to Ultrix 
and older BSD-UNIXen, which are my real favorites. (and sunos 4.1.3 :) 

On Fri, 25 May 2001, Gunther 
Schadow wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> now I have to ask, ...
> 
> ... why is it that suddenly I hear people talking about 4.3 BSD?
> What kind of release do you refer to? 4.3BSD/Net2? Has another
> source code tree turned up on the net? Has the current legal owner
> of the remaining proprietory stuff finally set this free (so that
> the whole legal battle with UCB in the mid 90s was pointless?)
> Why not 4.4BSD Lite? Or are you talking Ultrix? Or do you mean
> FreeBSD 4.3-RELEASE :-)
> 
> regards,
> -Gunther