William Frederick (Bill) Jolitz was born in Michigan. He grew up in the midwest, east, and then finally western United States, as the family followed the aerospace business around the country. William Jolitz attended Lynbrook High School in San Jose, California, and worked at NASA Ames Research Center while a high school and college student. While attending the University of California, Berkeley he was part of the Homebrew Computer Club .

He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in Computer Science and has been a member of the Berkeley Engineering Society.

Lynne Greer Jolitz , formerly Lynne Greer Messner, was born in Fremont, California. Lynne received a Bloss Scholarship for outstanding achievement to attend Berkeley upon graduation from Merced High School.

Lynne remembers one of her fond memories of high school - appearing in the local high school musical:

A student of natural history and anthropology, Lynne made a shift into "hard science" and following high school went to the University of California at Berkeley in the Physics department. Surrounded by Nobel prize winners, Lynne Jolitz graduated from Berkeley and applied her skills in business and technology pursuits, eventually finding a home in understanding how technology and people fit together.

William and Lynne Jolitz were inspired to work on 386BSD by the experience with Symmetric Computer Systems (see "William Jolitz and Symmetric Computer Systems") and the uses of BSD on a ubiquitous platform it inspired. BSD needed to jump to the 386. According to the website (see the_past() - name_origin):

In looking for the good, the simplest spanning name to grab mindshare was chosen. Just as Windows and UNIX have been named the same all along, saw no need in any different name. Others, in attempting to look for the bad, chose to narrowly view the name as applying to a specific chip to force an unearned claim of obsolescence. Inside all of them, the machine dependant names are all "386".

Benjamin Torsten Jolitz is into robotics, science fiction, computers, and telescopes. Ben rebuilt a 30 year old telescope and hand-ground mirror from his Grandpa (see "Where Ben's Scope came from ... ") and used it to win a second place in earth / space science at the 2004 Synopsys science fair with a study of collimation techniques (see "Benjamin Jolitz Wins Science Fair Award "). Ben likes hanging around the SJAA ATM guys talking shop and grinding his own mirror. Ben also likes showing off his scope at star parties - especially to pretty girls who like science (see "Tech Trek 2003 Star Party").

Ben is an accomplished Berkeley Unix 386BSD system administrator, and also handles video production technical and support issues. Ben collaborates on short subject films and participates in film festivals - his latest work "Bots" (see "Jolitz Family Video - Bots" for web video and "Bots DVD by Benjamin Jolitz and Rebecca Jolitz" for a DVD) is a comedic exploration of the roles of robots in popular films. Ben says BSD is technically better than Linux, but thinks conflicting shared libraries, incompatible threading, and inconsistent program development makes BSD "run like crap". He thinks the Linux community is much more together because the BSD side is "too old, full of it, and doesn't want to learn python".

Rebecca Dawn Jolitz loved science fiction, filmmaking, and astronomy from her earliest years. At star parties for the public, Rebecca showed people the planets and stars (her favorite double is Alberio, the blue and gold "Cal star") with her Celestron C-5 telescope. Rebecca had even taken her telescope to Stanford Tech Trek (see "Rebecca Jolitz Demos Telescope Techniques at Stanford Tech Trek") to demonstrate how SCT telescopes work, even though she wants to major in astrophysics at Cal. She went to Cal Day every year, especially to see Professor Shugart do his "Fun with Physics" lecture.

Rebecca accomplished much as a video editor and producer, and created movies for film festivals (see "Rebecca Jolitz Debuts Movie in Kids Film Fest"). She currently works on a research project on video serving for educational use using a modern version of Berkeley Unix 386BSD (Jolix).

Rebecca spent much of her youth on basketball, needlework, playing the guitar, and collecting Breyer horses.

Archive of published works of various kinds by Jolitz. An essential part of the Jolitz Heritage has been widespread publication, commentary, and opinion. Literally hundreds of these items that are slowly being assembled into this site. Check back soon both for missing older items and new ones as well!

William Leonard (Bill) Jolitz, a native of Duluth Minnesota, made the transition from a boy from the "wrong side of the track" to esteemed chemical engineer, inventor, and aerospace engineer in Silicon Valley. Like so many other men of the time, he was recruited and served in the European theater of World War II, most notably at the Battle of the Bulge. After returning from the war and completing his engineering studies at the University of Minnesota, he wisely convinced Norma I. Westman, a Duluth Swedish beauty, to marry him. They had four children (Brenda, Marsha (dec.), William Frederick, and Kimberly), and remained happily married until his death in 1994.