William Jolitz and Lynne Jolitz did the first open source operating system. This mentions where it came from, what happened, and what we use it for now.

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".

At the time, very few systems were available to run BSD - mostly VAX computers, which were rapidly becoming obselete. The Symmetric 375's processor family, much like a VAX, was capable of this, but rapidly losing ground to the Intel 386 as the manufacturer lost interest in the general systems business, and Symmetric donated its code back. According to the website:

William knew that the 386 would win for the next 40 years, not because of technology but because of being intent on always holding the general systems business ground. Others say fit to put down this choice, and focus on other architectures like the Alpha, 68000, and MIPS, while still deriving almost all activity from the 386.

From the start, 386BSD did not have the ambitions of its rivals at the time. Nor did it approach the public in the cut throat, ruthless manner that others in both the so called "freeware" and attempted commercial sides did. Public relations, disinformation, and other "spiking" manuevers, while common, were never a part of 386BSD - simply did not play that game. Having a significant business background, the real players could counter such easily with far greater effect. Either the elements of an emerging "open source" market would come to need what was being assembled, or would not. It appears they do not need the robust or scalability as we intended.

Lynne felt that the knowledge of BSD would be lost in a matter of years. General systems needed the secrets for the future. According to the website:

Less than a third of the original, visonary BSD design ever was completed. In the mad rush to complete the so-called 4.4BSD system, much of the best was abandoned, intended to be given life in commercial form, yet those so called authors never had the interest, intellect, or drive to do any of it, just adjusting history to suit - perhaps they found making a product harder than it looked when some of them worked at Symmetric. At least some of this history has been captured.

William and Lynne have a long history with both the University of California and BSD. According to the website:

In addition, totally unacknowledged by the University of California was the almost daily presence of William Jolitz on campus for years in the assembly of the general BSD release, having arranged for donations by Compaq, interviews with members of the press, and drop-ins by many software experts to encourage contribution and cooperation. Original logs kept from the time show contributions of vastly more than "6 modules" claimed by such sources.

William and Lynne released 386BSD many times, including a published CDROM on very little resources. According to the website:

A very rare thing occured with the intimate creation of BSD while an article series was being written at the same time. Jon Erickson, editor of DDJ, let us chronicle the effort as it came together in the University offices, receiving some of the articles directly via the net from there.

386BSD was a fascinating project that both enjoyed. The community it formed made up a large part of their life. According to the website:

When the community could take on an area, complete portions of the system could be refined with the kernel getting smaller and the subsystem(s) becoming seperately scaleable. As a result it departed further from UNIX antiquities, which annoyed many who didn't see (or care) the advantage, but were annoyed at the added workload this created. When it was mentioned that brk() had been finally exhumed from the kernel, Dennis Ritchie remarked that while wise, he didn't think those who used it as a simple checkpoint facility would be pleased (they weren't).

All good things must come to an end. So it was with the public growth of 386BSD usage. Why?

It may have to do with origins and expectations being mismatched. 386BSD was not intended as an omnibus project to "hack Berkeley Unix with", but to refine operating systems concepts. This didn't please everybody. Early on, many contributions and effort was pushed to "explode" rather than reduce complexity, often without justification other than "that's the way we do it". In the mad rush to be the "one, true OS", apparently many didn't care about the minimalism William and Lynne found the most essential part of the entire UNIX experience.

Our ambition was to revise and reduce the UNIX paradigm before explosive growth confused and weakened the core structure with uncoordinated dependancies. Other work with the UNIX paradigm has resulted in a more fragile, less robust system that weakens as it grows, because the modular framework does not compartmentalize additions. Attempts by others like MACH or HURD to accomplish this did not scale nor reduce the size of the problem, just moved it.

Is 386BSD lost and gone forever? No, it isn't. The work on 386BSD continues to this day.

The386BSD Release 1.0 Reference CDROM, a cooperative venture with William and Lynne Jolitz and Dr. Dobbs Journal, was a compendium of five years (1989 to 1994) of articles, writings, code annotations, and source code of the 386BSD project, with periodic updates. The CDROM was sold through CMP Publications from 1994 through 1997. In 1996 we published Volume 1 in the our operating systems series Operating System Source Code Secrets Volume 1: The Basic Kernel.

At this point, the work to develop a modular Unix operating system was completed, and 386BSD became a much more interesting project. Ironically, it was the attempt by *BSD offshoots of 386BSD to deal a deathblow to their progenitor through a concerted whinefest campaign (we still hear the pathetic "Bill abandoned us" moans to this day) that allowed us to move on and finally work on the ideas we had in new design without the need to meet hard release deadlines and short-term political agendas. Of course, as we anticipated, the struggle for dominance led them to assemble dead-end implementations inferior to the Linux juggernaut. Berkeley Unix was always strongest in future and new directions, and weakest in anticipating and meeting the daily demands of a fickle customer base. Unlike many of the *BSD groups, we had real job experience in both research (through Berkeley) and in the commercial realm, and not surprisingly the goals are often conflicting. A maxim in the business world is "Play to your strengths". In throwing away their fundamental strength, the *BSD splinter groups lost the present and the future. We chose the future, if only because it was the right thing to do.

Some of this new work has been described by Lynne Jolitz in her 2002 paper for the Grace Hopper Women in Computing Conference entitled From 386bsd to OSPREY: The Evolution of an Operating System exploring examining server constraints from the standpoint of operating systems architecture.

New writings and work appear occasionally through Jolix. We chose to use the Jolix name since it is a personal view of how operating systems can be evolved beyond the BSD paradigms to fit modern needs. Unix as envisioned by Dennis Ritchie way back in the mid-1970's is over thirty years old. Perhaps we'll find that Unix is completely obviated by a different paradigm of computing as it becomes more and more obsolete in an interconnected mobile world. Or perhaps we'll be able to cudgel together the old monolithic kernel idea one more time.

Or maybe, just maybe, the world will be complex enough that no one paradigm can dominate all areas of computing from routers to mobile gadgets. In that case, doesn't it stand to reason that the same will be true of operating systems?

• The Fun with 386BSD

  Lynne's first step into the business of operating system open source was with the official CDROM release of 386BSD, and how the project rolled out with the publisher.. In her own words:

• Lynne's Take on Tech - 386BSD Design Notes Video Series: Configuration Story
  

  Ordered configuration is simple design, but is it good design? Join William and Lynne as they discuss the issues, architecture, and implementation of an unordered configuration model in the 386BSD Design Notes video Configuration Story. Early work appeared in 386BSD Release 1.0, while later versions of Lynne's Take on Tech - Give Me That Old Homebrew Computer Club
  

  Doug Millison of SiliconValleyWatcher reminisces about the HomeBrew Computer Club. Now, I wasn't a member, but my husband William Jolitz used to show up now and then at SLAC for the meetings when he could get away from Berkeley and BSD work. So he added a little to the collective memory.

  From William's comme ...
  

• Lynne's Take on Tech - Oh, Goodie! Another Academic on 386BSD...
  

  Another paper handed to me, this one on "open source governance" (isn't that a bit of a oxymoron?), with the usual "Isn't this wrong about 386BSD?" attached to the email. With the John Adams philosophy that "facts are stubborn things" firmly in place, I perused it, leaving errors outside of 386BSD for others to find.

  Oh, boy. I found it to contain serious inaccur ...
  

• Lynne's Take on Tech - Fun Friday: Happy Birthday 386BSD!
  

  Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds. - George Eliot.

  Today is a special day. Exactly 14 years ago today, after 15 monthly feature articles on Porting Unix to the 386 appeared in Dr. Dobbs Journal, 386BSD Release 0.0 went public.

  A number of 386BSD enthusiasts have noticed that we always favored holidays for releases. St. Patrick, as ...
  

• Lynne's Take on Tech - Fun Friday: Jimmy Dolittle and the BSD Bomb
  

  BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) has had a long and somewhat checkered history full of avarice and heartbreak. While revered (and still used) by many, BSD releases have been 1) obviated by "better" proprietary systems (e.g. SunOS to Solaris), 2) licensed to death (AT&T / USL / whoever), 3) unlicensed and released to great acclaim and even great expectations (386BSD), and 4) once some flaw is found, dispised, derived, hacked, and then ...
  

• Lynne's Take on Tech - When Internet Rants Go Too Far - How Vulgar Commentary Masks Naked Power Struggles
  

  Sometimes I have problems categorizing articles I discuss. Perhaps this item would have fit in "women & technology", but I don't think this is exclusively a "woman's problem". Since I've seen this since the days of Unix and experienced the brunt of it during the pioneering days of open source and 386BSD, I think it may belong in a broader category than that peddled by the vanishing newspapers.

  ...
  
• Lynne's Take on Tech - Fun Friday - the Curse of BSD and the Four Mistakes
  

  My discussion earlier this week on inaccuracies in papers discussing the evolution and history of 386BSD resulted in some very interesting questions (see Oh, Goodie! Another Academic on 386BSD...). And a really nice question from suresh at Berkeley: "I'd like to hear your opinion: why did BSD lose to Linux in the battle for OSS hegemony..? How was the BSD release arch ...
  

• Lynne's Take on Tech - Fun Friday: DSL Debacles, Celebrity Linux, and Ubuntu
  

  Tom Foremski of Siliconvalleywatcher.com has picked up my little meditation on how telcom companies keep competitors from serving DSL even if they don't want the business (see DSL Debacles and Competitor Cheats) with the headline "Lynne Jolitz tries to get DSL on a ...
  

• Lynne's Take on Tech - A Wandering through the Vintage Computer Faire
  

  The Vintage Computer Faire was held last weekend at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View last weekend. Sellam Ismail, VCF Coordinator and vintage computer collector, was kind enough to send me a couple of passes. Unlike the cozy NASA-Ames location of several years ago, the Vintage Computer Faire, typically home of games, small computers like t ...
  

• Lynne's Take on Tech - Misplaced Software Priorities
  

  For a perspective from William Jolitz, co-developer of 386BSD, on the need to separate "innovation" from "renovation" in design, read Misplaced Software Priorities today. While it may gore a few oxen - especially those who work in the architectural flatland of low-level ...
  

• Lynne's Take on Tech - Where's the Simplicity in Web Services?
  

  Martin LaMonica wrote an interesting piece in Cnet lamenting the lack of "simplicity" in web services today. According to the article "Tim Bray, co-inventor of XML and director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems, said recently that Web services standards have become 'bloated, opaque and insanely complex.'". I think Bray is being far too kind.

  < ...
  
• Lynne's Take on Tech - RMS, SCO and 386BSD
  

  Griff Palmer over at the Merc is an interesting guy. And his take on the SCO-IBM legal feud is pretty simple too - "More than once since the SCO mess came up, I've heard people say, "No problem. If SCO wins, we'll just go to *BSD." I guess open source types are "glass half full" kind of guys.

  Griff notes I'm pretty nice in not nitpicking his essay - "I'm glad that someone of your technical stature doesn't find fault (or, at least, not fault enough to mention) in my piece." But I'm also ...
  

• Lynne's Take on Tech - Prime Time for Open Source?
  

  Griff Palmer of the Merc in his article Linux nears the tipping point speculates on whether it is really ready for primetime with consumers. The problem is that everyone who works with this stuff is already used to all of its oddities, so how can we tell a consumer can use it?

  Well, I'm going to presume to speak a bit about it. First because I beat him (and probably most everyone else) in his serio ...
  

• Lynne's Take on Tech - On the Road Again with Microsoft Research
  

  Microsoft Research had its annual "Roadshow" event to demo all their new ideas. After the usual introduction in the traditional Klingon style (how big they are, how many battles they've won and enemies they've killed, and so on), Jim Gray said a few words about "TerraServer".

  TerraServer deals with the issue of large datasets. It is a 20 Terabyte data source (of USGS images) handling 10 million hits per day as a web service. On the insides, it uses commodity X86 servers (surprise - and ...
  

• Lynne's Take on Tech - Free Culture and the Internet by Lynne Jolitz in Dr. Dobbs Journal
  

  Well, my book review Free Culture And the Internet discussing Larry Lessig's latest book is now on the newstand in Dr. Dobbs Journal. After I had Coffee with Larry Lessig back in April of this year, he kindly had a copy sent to me.

  My background in this area is most extensive - in fact, it predates Dr. Lessig's professional interest by a bit. ...
  

• Lynne's Take on Tech - Remember when "design" meant "reliable"
  

  Dennis Rockstroh of ActionLine in the Merc attempted to handle the frustration of a Sony Vaio user recently. Turns out the poor man continually had the power just blit out on him while working on his laptop. Back and forth to the factory it went, never seeming to get any better. Dennis helped the gentleman get a replacement laptop from the factory, but no one seemed to understand why such a problem was occurring and why it required a complete replacement to rectify. Sony didn't wish to ...
  

• Lynne's Take on Tech - TCO, Firefox, Open Source, and the Release Engineering Blues
  

  Getting Dan Kusnetzky, Program Vice President, System Software, Enterprise Computing Group, at IDC to sit a minute and talk isn't easy. He's usually putting on the frequent flyer miles for corporate executives all over the country. But sometimes you just need to grab a cup of coffee between the Apple confab and exec fests (I keep thinking Mini Mac like MiniMe in Austin Powers, or like a small Big Mac- not Mac Mini like the marketing folk want. Do you think anyone noticed how easy it was to s ...
  

• Lynne's Take on Tech - What's All This Stuff About Linux?
  

  Well, after all those rabid attacks on Ken Brown of the Alexis d'Toqueville Society by Linux and free software fanatics over his papers (see Fire in the Hole), I just had to meet him in person. So here I was today at Bucks in Woodside, chatting up the future of open source, 386BSD, and the next wave of In ...
  

• Lynne's Take on Tech - Dump the Java, Brush Up On Your Python -or- You Mean Cover Girl Doesn't Work for HDTV?
  

  Two amusing little items in media today. The first is a definite win for python (and like, why use Java?). DVD Jon has put together a little python script which intercepts the music file before they're encapsulated in Apple's DRM. What's that mean? That means you still pay for the tune, but you now have the raw file, which means you can play it elsewhere... ...
  

• Lynne's Take on Tech - The League of Extraordinary OSes
  

  Every now and then I get handed a paper and asked for feedback. Most of the time, these papers have long boring titles and lots of funny charts with red error bars on them. I've even written a few of them myself, so I guess that's why I get handed more and more. But go ahead - I enjoy another article on clustering (Gordon Bell handed me one a while back) or TOE's (that was one of the SiliconTCP boys). I'll even look at the "let's drop TCP and make it fast" papers, because sometimes the autho ...
  

• Lynne's Take on Tech - Fun Friday - accoona matata BSD?
  

  Regarding Saul Hansell's report on the launch of Accoona, with star power brought to bear by Bill Clinton courtesy of a large undisclosed contribution to his library by the Chinese government yesterday - I am puzzled. If Accoona is a variant on "hakuna", and is derived from the phrase "hakuna matata" for "no worries", and if, according to the Swahili English dictionary matata plu ...
  

• Lynne's Take on Tech - Why You Can't Buy SpamQuiz!
  

  I was puzzled recently when a friend couldn't get his email through to me. We have our own spam filter we called SpamQuiz which nicely takes care of Nigerian pleas and lottery solicitations. SpamQuiz is not a product - it's a project we did at TeleMuse Networks testing ISP correctness and email ...
  

• Lynne's Take on Tech - Berkeley Physics Bids Farewell to Nobel Prize Winner and Colleague
  

  Last Sunday in the Great Room of the University of California at Berkeley Faculty club, the physics department held a memorial for Dr. Owen Chamberlain, physicist, activist and Nobel prize winner. Owen, who died on February 28th, 2006 after a long bout with Parkenson's disease, was a protege and colleague of the late Dr. Emilio Segre, with whom he shared the 1959 Nobel prize in physics for their discovery of the antiproton.

  Dr. Segre died in 1989 (the same year Owen retired) and the B ...
  

• Lynne's Take on Tech - When Video Kills Your Drive - Quicktime Waxes Track 0
  

  Alright! Yes, sometimes I do read slashdot when it's amusing, and the discussion of how you can create your own custom panic screen (or BSOD window) for OS/X via an API is amusing (my son Ben points this stuff out for me - he feels it's one of his sacred tasks). Joke panic screens have been around a long time, but the battle over "how much information to give people" has led to many not-so-amusing battles, especially when we were creating Lynne's Take on Tech - Open Source and Russell's Paradox - A New Commons?
  

  Jesus Villasante, a senior official at the European Union Commission in charge of Software Technologies in a spontaneous panel discussion on open source decided to shine a light on the lack of coordination, the influence of commercial interests, and the inability to evolve beyond current corporate paradigms. "Companies are using the potential of communities as subcontractors--the open-source community today (is a) subcontractor of American multinationals." Mr. Villasante is completely correct ...
  

• Lynne's Take on Tech - You Can't Con all of the Icons All of the Time
  

  Bravo to Alan Deutschman of Fast Company on his Icon book review. According to Alan, since Jobs won't cooperate with any biographer after Michael Moritz's successful book "The Little Kingdom" in the 1980's, "Jobs' freeze-out gives two options to would-be biographers: Either they can succeed at a bit of investigative reporting, or they can plunder the work of thos ...
  

• Lynne's Take on Tech - Open Source - The Times They Are A Changing
  

  Three very interesting little open source stories passed my desk recently that I found shone facets on open source issues.

  Last week, the Industrial Commercial Bank of China has signed a deal with Unix-clone Turbolinux to run open-source software in all of the bank's operations. "Linux deployment is growing in China, with software makers targeting segments such as banking, insurance and wireless applications. Intel last year began a program to boost sales in China of desktop computers ...
  

• Lynne's Take on Tech - First They Watch the Movie, and Then They Read the Book
  

  When Margaret Heffernan was on her book tour for The Naked Truth, an insider look at women in business, I grabbed her after the talk and had her do a brief pitch to her readers. Took me about five minutes to produce with MinutePitch. It was very satisfying to see the author of the book tell me why I should buy it. And as an Lynne's Take on Tech - Of Virtualization and IPOs
  

  VMWare is the little company that could. When it was launched in the late 1990's, the "smart money" wouldn't touch it. It wasn't just that it was open source - a big "loser" badge at that time. It wasn't just that it was founded in part by a husband-wife team who had established business (Tandem, SGI,...) and academic credentials (UCB, Stanford, MIT,...) - an even bigger "loser" badge that still persists in some dark corners. It's biggest damnation by old-line investment was that virtualizati ...
  

• Lynne's Take on Tech - Oh Microsoft, Google is Calling - They Want the OS Space
  

  With the announcement of Android, the Google open source mobile platform, there has been breathless talk of Google taking out the "locked" cellphone market with a Linux OS version. But we all know there are many open source Linux OS mobile versions already out there, so grabbing one and putting some stuff into it isn't really that hard. In fact, one wag I know had this little joke:

  How many Google Ph.D's does it take to create a mobile operating system? Answer - 1000. One to dow ...
  
• Lynne's Take on Tech - Fun Friday - Homer's Illiad to be "Improved" for Silicon Valley
  

  Well, given the egos in Silicon Valley, it comes as no surprise that a press release like this would appear. It was so inaccurate that the Wall Street Journal got fooled and then had to reverse themselves and say Bill Joy is not a "venture partner" after all. Steve Lohr of the NY Times commen ...
  

• Lynne's Take on Tech - Fun Friday: Google Test Positive, Laser Bits, Gender Blues
  

  While we were working on getting all those Jolix 386BSD fans their Porting Unix to the 386 articles (we have been swamped BTW - and yes, there's more coming), a few other items of interest this week...

  If you made money on Google (or if you wished you had made money on Google), you might try using The Google Test to eval ...
  

• Lynne's Take on Tech - Fun Friday: A Tale of Two Women
  

  I was struck by the contrast in reporting of two very different women in Silicon Valley. Matt Marshall writes of Joanna Rees-Gallanter, aka "Alley Cat", as she goes through a tumultous rolling close of her new venture fund at VSP Capital. As Matt puts it "She's got an interesting story, and it reveals the kind of grit it takes to get where she is. She told us about how people laughed at he ...
  

• Lynne's Take on Tech - Anne Wojcicki, Google and the Changing Face of Silicon Valley - A Watershed Moment
  

  Silicon Valley has been considered a hallmark of the American Horatio Alger legend - come with an idea, build it, and become rich and famous. And it is true that many men have arrived here with little more than a degree and an idea and built a fortune. But the dirty little secret in Silicon Valley has been that those who didn't fit the "look and feel" of investors were far less likely to get a meeting, much less a deal. African-American men in particular have long complained about the parochi ...
  

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  Started open source UNIX.
  
  Appeared in part as a 17 article magazine series in 1991-1992.
  
  Documented the "how, what, why, who, when" of porting BSD to the 386.
  
  Done while BSD was becoming "open source".

  Want to receive an e-mail alert?

  Started open source UNIX.
  
  Appeared in part as a 17 article magazine series in 1991-1992.
  
  Documented the "how, what, why, who, when" of porting BSD to the 386.
  
  Done while BSD was becoming "open source".

  386BSD Users

  Started open source UNIX.
  
  Appeared in part as a 17 article magazine series in 1991-1992.
  
  Documented the "how, what, why, who, when" of porting BSD to the 386.
  
  Done while BSD was becoming "open source".

  Started open source UNIX.
  
  Appeared in part as a 17 article magazine series in 1991-1992.
  
  Documented the "how, what, why, who, when" of porting BSD to the 386.
  
  Done while BSD was becoming "open source".

  Porting Unix to the 386: Designing the Software Specification

  This, the first article, is the first published mention of 386BSD. By this time, the project had been operational for 18 months, and William Jolitz was at Berkeley working on the Net/2 release.
  In this installment, we discussed the beginning of our project and the initial framework that guided our efforts, in particular, the development of the 386BSD specification.

  Porting Unix to the 386: Three Initial PC Utilities

  The second article in the "PORTING UNIX TO THE 386" series discussed the utilities we had to build to test the port on an actual 80386 PC.
  By far, the most popular article.

  Porting Unix to the 386: The Standalone System

  This article, last of the original three done altogether in 1990, on getting the critical pieces functioning independantly that we needed to do the port. Once these we obtained, the kernel was inevitable.

  Porting Unix to the 386: Language Tools Cross Support

  We describe the need and use of a cross-support environment to create 386 code from a non-386 machine, so as to create the initial binarys before our port can generate them.

  Porting Unix to the 386: Copyrights, Copylefts, and Competitive Advantage

  We describe the origin and orientation of the "Free Software" vs. "Open Software" efforts via respective licenses.

  Porting Unix to the 386: The Initial Root Filesystem

  We build the first instance of the root filesystem - before any operational system is present on the 386 to build one. Part of the bootstrapping cycle of getting up the first running system on a new architecture.

  Porting Unix to the 386: Research and the Commercial Sector

  Understanding the boundary between research and development with BSD, and where a balance between commercial efforts can be struck.

"Be Excellent to Each Other, and Program on, Dudes!"