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A Narrative History of BSD, Dr. Kirk McKusick

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  • Recommended by 3 people: 3 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2013 to 2017.
  • Presented by Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick, BSD developer

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

29K views17 years ago3 recommendations

History and cultureSystems programmingHistory of computingOperating systems

Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick shares the history of the Berkeley Software Distributions, from its 1970s origins to the 1990s open-source release.

dcbsdcon 2009 dr. marshall kirk mckusick a narrative history of bsd Learn the history of the BSD (Berkeley Software Distributions) from one of its key developers, who brings the history to life, complete with anecdotes and footnotes to the historical narrative. The BSD community began at the UC Berkeley in the late 1970s. You'll hear about the triumphs and defeats of the project and its releases during its heyday in the 1980s. The Berkeley era concludes with the tumultuous lawsuit, ultimately settled in Berkeley's favor, which allowed the final release in 1992 of 4.4BSD-Lite, an open-source version of BSD. Source: Jason Dixon

Why it's here

3 people recommend this

What people say. Highly recommended for its fascinating first-hand anecdotes about the development, politics, and legal battles of early BSD Unix.

chuboton Hacker News • Recommends

On “The Government Shutdown Has Revealed Silicon Valley’s Dysfunction Fetish”

EDIT: Watch this video for details! link to this video Key quotes around 8:30 - 9:00, but the whole thing is excellent. DARPA was funding all sorts of different networking and operating systems, which in those days were all incompatible. But they wanted them to cooperate, hence open source BSD and the Internet. Silicon Valley doesn't get this kind of cooperation. In stark contrast, a proven business tactic is to undermine cooperation by poisoning open standards (e.g. embrace and extend).
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networkedon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: Your favorite YouTube channels?”

BSDs, game design and computer history: — link collects talks from various BSD conferences. An interesting non-technical talk from the collection is "A Narrative History of BSD" by Marshall Kirk McKusick ( link to this video ). — link — lectures on game design and development by Chris Crawford ( Balance of Power , The Art of Computer Game Design ) uploaded by the man himself. "The Dragon Speech" of his can be found elsewhere on YouTube ( link ). — link — early computer graphics demo reels, mostly from the '80s.
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pjmlpon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave”

If you have some time to refresh memory. "A Narrative History of BSD by Dr. Kirk McKusick" link to this video "Unix came into many CS departments largely because it was the only powerful interactive system that could run on the sort of hardware (PDP-11s) that universities could afford in the mid '70s. In addition, Unix itself was also very inexpensive. Since source code was provided, it was a system that could be shaped to the requirements of a particular installation." link
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krylonon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Backslash must die”

There is a talk by Kirk McKusick on YouTube1 where he tells about that time, and IIRC, Bill Joy got his hands on an early version of BBN's code, started hacking on it and put it into BSD. BBN and DARPA were not very amused, but by the time BBN's stack was finished, the BSD version had better performance and/or lower packet loss, so it stuck. Apparently Mike Muuss compared the two implementations, and his recommendation to go with Bill Joy's code was the decisive factor. 1 link to this video - I think that's the one
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