On Monday, March 10, 2003, at 09:03 AM, Gregory S. DeLozier wrote: > BSD/OS refers to a variant of the Unix operating system that > developed at UC Berkeley (BSD stands for Berkeley Software > Distribution) in the 80's and 90's, and then given over to a > freeware development group which distributed it as FreeBSD > (and variants from this...)
well... not exactly. there are still some commercial non-free BSD-based OS's out there. BSD turned over considerable amounts of code to the public domain, but not directly to FreeBSD. the BSD code was adopted by many different organizations, including FreeBSD. there's also a NetBSD and an OpenBSD, and a few others. these are more siblings of FreeBSD and children of BSD, though FreeBSD gets it's roots through 386BSD along with NetBSD... they aren't based on FreeBSD itself. each of the free BSD's (Free, Net, Open) has a different target. > It is considered to be an exceptionally stable operating system, > and was chosen to serve as base code for OS/X at some point. > If I understand correctly, one of the primary coordinators of > the FreeBSD effort (Jordan Hubbard) is now an Apple employee. Jordan Hubbard and the name "BSD" are about the only things that OS X and FreeBSD have in common. OS X's implementation of BSD is actually based on NeXTStep. NeXTStep pre-dates FreeBSD by several years. A port of 4.3BSD to a kernel called Mach happened somewhere around 1986, and NeXTStep is based on Mach 2.5. OS X's BSD core is, in turn, based on 4.3BSD through NeXTStep and Mach 2.5. FreeBSD comes along much later, though. FreeBSD is an offshoot of 386BSD (which later became NetBSD), which was in turn based on a variant of 4.3BSD called NET/2. All of this happened around 1990-1992. > So BSD/OS could refer to FreeBSD, Apple's initial variant (Darwin), > or to OS/X which has many additional layers of software but is > still BSD-based. FreeBSD is Intel-based, but there are variants for > many machines, including a number of Macintosh platforms. (See > below...) BSD/OS can be used to refer to most of the surviving non-Linux unix OS's today, both free and commercial. Solaris and SunOS are BSD variants (although recentish versions of Solaris are more SVR4-ish). a VERY simplified version of the Unix family tree can be found at the link below. Note that it only goes through 1996 or so. Also, NeXTStep, the OS upon which OS X is based, is actually two or three steps away from "true" BSD. <http://www.ehlis.com/adam/solaris/history.html> -- The iMac List is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | - Epson Stylus Color 580 Printers - new at $69 | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> iMac List info: <http://lowendmac.com/imac/list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/imac-list%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
