A Narrative History of BSD, Dr. Kirk McKusick

bsdconferences · 30K views · 2009-04-19 · 53:55

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Overview

Kirk McKusick gives a narrative history of BSD from its start at UC Berkeley in the late 1970s through the 1980s releases and the lawsuit that led to 4.4BSD-Lite in 1992. It is full of anecdotes from a key developer.

On Hacker News

Recommended as an engaging, non-technical history of Unix and BSD from someone who was there, and cited for specific stories like the TCP/IP stack.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2013–2017

Topics

Operating systems & kernels Linux & open-source ecosystems History of computing

What people said

chubot · 2013-10 · Strong recommendation
EDIT: Watch this video for details! [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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pjmlp · 2017-02 · Recommendation
If you have some time to refresh memory. "A Narrative History of BSD by Dr. Kirk McKusick" [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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networked · 2014-04 · Recommendation
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 ( [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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