Ha! That’s some rose-colored-glasses view of BSD history.

The lawsuit didn’t help. But the BSD developers shot themselves in the foot when they refused to support x86, referring to it as a “toy”.

It wasn't until Linux came along and started eating up all of BSD's user base that they freaked out and decided x86 support might be a good idea. But by then it was too late.

▲ hylaride 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't recall them refusing to support x86, but BSD development was mostly done by academics rewriting and improving AT&T UNIX, which was mostly on big iron systems of the time. They were focused on academic computer science work. The lawsuits stopped a lot of BSD work as the universities were sorting it all out. William and Lynne Jolitz start porting 4.3BSD to the Intel 80386 at Berkeley in 1989 (but the code wasn't released for years due to said lawsuit) before Linux existed. That is the first BSD-on-x86 work; by December 1990 they had contributed a working port to UCB. Most of the code didn't see the light of day until ~1992.

Also, usable and production ready BSDs were running large websites on x86 long before linux became mainstream and well-supported enough to be used. The BSD TCP/IP stack was the reference implementation for ages and BSD was heavily used in the internet's early days as a lot of early companies spun out of Californian universities. Hotmail ran on FreeBSD. Early SunOS variants were based off of BSD, as were some other commercial unixes.

The bigger killer, I think, is that BSD was (and still has) a bit of closed mindset to newcomers and were and are more conservative to new technology, despite some foundations of techbeing started with them. Docker's origins can be directly traced to FreeBSD jails. Sometimes the conservatism is warranted and a benefit (eg OpenSSH).

▲ znpy 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I go back to take a look at the BSDs every now and then and frankly it really looks like that mindset has stayed, somehow.

Generally speaking the BSDs seems really fork-a-phobic and it kinda shows given how little dynamism is there in the development those systems.

Even the Solaris derivatives have a faster tempo.

▲ ErroneousBosh 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> But the BSD developers shot themselves in the foot when they refused to support x86, referring to it as a “toy”.

When was that? Presumably wwaaaaaaaay before 386BSD was a thing right?

▲ mmh0000 2 hours ago | parent [-]

386BSD came out about the right time, but as noted, development was slow, and the original author abandoned it pretty quickly while at the same time Linux was actively gaining traction and growing rapidly.

Quotes below:

  "No one else saw the 386 as interesting. Berkeley had a myopic attitude toward PCs. They were just toys. No one would support Intel." — Jordan Hubbard [1]


  ---

   Jolitz's project, of course, found many people on the Net who didn't think it was just a toy. Once he put the source code on the Net, a bloom of enthusiasm spread through the universities and waystations of the world. People wanted to experiment with a high-grade OS and most could only afford relatively cheap hardware like the 386. Sure, places like Berkeley could get the government grant money and the big corporate donations, but 2,000-plus other schools were stuck waiting. Jolitz's version of 386BSD struck a chord.

  While news traveled quickly to some corners, it didn't reach Finland. Network Release 2 came in June 1991, right around the same time that Linus Torvalds was poking around looking for a high-grade OS to use in experiments. Jolitz's 386BSD came out about six months later as Torvalds began to dig into creating the OS he would later call Linux. Soon afterward, Jolitz lost interest in the project and let it lie, but others came along. In fact, two groups called NetBSD and FreeBSD sprang up to carry the torch.

  --- [2]

[1] https://www.doc-reform.org/spine/en/html/free_for_all.peter_...

[2] https://www.sisudoc.org/spine/en/html/free_for_all.peter_way...