Jolitz Heritage

In the 1980's I had handled licensing and operations for Unix at Symmetric Computer Systems, so I was very familiar with proprietary source issuance and maintenance. But in those days, Unix was installed and tested on our Symmetric 375 workstations (NS32000 based). We did supply a floppy or tape backup, but when the customer got the machine all she had to do was turn it on - tedious installations were definitely a thing of the past in the past!

But with 386BSD it was a different world. 386/486 PCs were purchased separately by the customer, who then installed 386BSD on the drive. If you had Internet connectivity, you had no problem - the release was available for download. But what if you didn't have that connectivity? Remember - in 1992 Internet connectivity was still uncommon outside of universities, government, and corporations.

Installing the first release of 386BSD wasn't easy, and you needed over 30 floppies, so "386BSD install parties" were set up - informal get-togethers to load 386BSD on your PC. Groups like the Silicon Valley Unix User Group would run installations in the back of the room during meetings. 386BSD Release 0.1, unlike the earlier version, came with easy automated setup and installation from Internet, CDROM, and floppy, so anyone could install it without having to be an expert. When this was released, the install parties phenomenon faded away.

386BSD fan FAQs, instructions, and bugfixes were quickly distributed via the Internet, along with software (some questionable, some proprietary, some really great). Since floppies were cumbersome, FTP Software decided to "give away" CDROMs of 386BSD at conferences. Other companies like InfoMagic sold the release on CDROM.

These unofficial CDROM releases were just bundled up 386BSD releases and updates the Jolitz team made on the Internet, and not commercial quality releases like those the Jolitz team did for Symmetric Computer Systems years earlier. There was no additional testing or quality control, and they worked or not.