How the Mac was born... supposedly...

From: Brad Parker <brad_at_heeltoe.com>
Date: Thu Jan 13 11:39:37 2005

Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
...
>where I took some CS courses. As far as I knew, SCO was the shit if you
>wanted Unix on a PC (circa 1990-1991). This all changed when Linux came
>out. It seemed like EVERYONE found out about it as it quite literally
>took the hacker community by storm and spread quickly and widely.

Well, that may have been how it seemed, but before linux was widely
available there was 386bsd. and then freebsd and netbsd... (on the x86
anyway).

I think 386bsd was the first unencumbered "free" unix I saw. I ran it
on several of my laptops (did some serious BGP development sitting on
the floor of my wife's grandmother's house :-)

But to be honest, at the time, anyone with a high speed internet
connection was using Sun's or VAXen.

As I remember, around '92 the free *bsd-on-x86 releases got stable
enough to run on the internet. Maybe it's just that I was a *bsd bigot
at the time. I do remember some friends running linux also but it was
shakey. This was before Alan and Alexy got into the linux networking
code (i think anyway, who knows. more wine!).

The networking on linux wasn't really ready for prime time as I recall
whereas the networking in *bsd was pretty solid. And after Van and
Sally had their way with it the TCP worked really well. I can't remember
when slow start and clocking got put in, it must have been around 90-91.
I remember being all excited about that at the time.

-brad
Received on Thu Jan 13 2005 - 11:39:37 GMT