diff --git a/handbook/history.sgml b/handbook/history.sgml index 8b747ea407..f2ec3b3f13 100644 --- a/handbook/history.sgml +++ b/handbook/history.sgml @@ -1,95 +1,95 @@ - + -A brief history of FreeBSD, according to Jordan Hubbard +A brief history of FreeBSD

Contributed by &a.jkh;. The FreeBSD project had its genesis in the early part of 1992, partially as an outgrowth of the "Unofficial 386BSD Patchkit" by the patchkit's last 3 coordinators: Nate Williams, Rod Grimes and myself. David Greenman and Julian Elischer were also lurking in the background around this time, though they didn't come fully into the project until a month or two after it was more or less officially launched. Our original goal was to produce an intermediate snapshot of 386BSD in order to fix a number of problems with it that the patchkit mechanism just wasn't capable of solving. Some of you may remember the early working title for the project being "386BSD 0.5" or "386BSD Interim" in reference to that fact. 386BSD was Bill Jolitz's operating system, which had been up to that point suffering rather severely from almost a year's worth of neglect. As the patchkit swelled ever more uncomfortably with each passing day, we were in unanimous agreement that something had to be done and decided to try and assist Bill by providing this interim "cleanup" snapshot. Those plans came to a rude halt when Bill Jolitz suddenly decided to withdraw his sanction from the project and without any clear indication of what would be done instead (and it was, in fact, to be another full year before he was even heard from in public again!). It didn't take us long to decide that the goal remained worthwhile even without Bill's support, and so we adopted the name "FreeBSD", which was coined by David Greenman. Our initial objectives were set after consulting with the system's current users and once it became clear that the project was on the road to perhaps even becoming a reality, I contacted Walnut Creek CDROM with an eye towards improving FreeBSD's distribution channels to those many unfortunates without easy access to the Internet. Walnut Creek CDROM not only supported the idea of distributing FreeBSD on CD but went so far as to provide the project with a machine to work on and a fast Internet connection. Without Walnut Creek CDROM's almost unprecidented degree of faith in what was, at the time, a completely unknown project, it is in fact very unlikely that FreeBSD would have gotten as far, as fast, as it has today. The first CDROM (and general net-wide) distribution was FreeBSD 1.0, released in December of '93. This was based on the 4.3 BSD Lite ("Net/2") tape from U.C. Berkeley with many components provided by 386BSD and the Free Software Foundation. It was a fairly reasonable success for a first offering, and we followed this release with the highly successful FreeBSD 1.1 version in May of 1994. Around this time, some rather unexpected storm clouds formed on our horizon as Novell and U.C. Berkeley settled their long-running lawsuit over the legal status of the Berkeley Net/2 tape. A condition of that settlement was U.C. Berkeley's concession that large parts of Net/2 was "encumbered" code and property of Novell, who had in turn aquired it from AT&T some time previously. What Berkeley got in return was Novell's "blessing" that the 4.4 Lite release, when it was finally released, would be declared unencumbered and all existing Net/2 users would be strongly encouraged to switch. This included us, and we were given until the end of July 1994 to stop shipping our own Net/2 based product. Under the terms of that agreement, were were allowed one last release before the deadline and that became FreeBSD 1.1.5.1, the culmination of our year's work with Net/2 and generally considered by many to be a significant project milestone for stability and general performance.. We then set about the arduous task of literally re-inventing ourselves with a completely new and rather incomplete set of 4.4 Lite bits. The "Lite" releases were light in part because Berkeley's CSRG removed large chunks of code required for actually making a bootable running system out of it due to various legal requirements and the fact that the Intel port of 4.4 was highly incomplete. It took us until December of 1994 to make this transition, and in January of 1995 we released FreeBSD 2.0 to the net and on CDROM. Despite being still more than a little rough around the edges, the release was a significant success and has since been followed by the more robust and easier to install FreeBSD 2.0.5 release in June of 1995. Where to from here? Well, we intend to release FreeBSD 2.1 sometime in September of 1995 and have reasonable expectations that it will meet or exceed all of the standards for quality we set with FreeBSD 1.1.5.1 back in July of 1994. From there, we'll probably go to a two-track scheme with a "stable" branch of FreeBSD and an "experimental" branch, where development can continue at its usually rapid pace without penalizing those who just want a stable, working system without too much excitement. We also intend to focus on any remaining areas of weakness, like documentation or missing drivers, and steadily increase the overall quality and feature set of the system well into 1996 and beyond. Jordan