The Making of BSD: The ACTUAL World's First Open-Source Operating System?

BSD the operating system mini claimed to be the actual world's first open source operating system initially called Berkeley Unix as it was based on the source code of the original Unix developed at Bell Labs BSD or Berkeley software distribution is a now discontinued operating system developed and distributed by the computer systems research group at the University of California Berkeley by a team led by Bill Joy in the 1970s a time where the Vietnam War was coming to an end the Watergate scandal dominated headlines leading to President Nixon's resignation therefore I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow disco music was on the rise and technologically there was a decade that saw the introduction of email pong the first personal computers such as the apple one and the founding of Microsoft by Bill Gates and Paul Allen I'm Bill Gates chairman of Microsoft all the while a little thing called Unix was being developed and to understand BSD you must understand these early days of Unix and that although it was proprietary the earliest distributions of Unix included the source code allowing researchers and universities to modify and extend units the operating system arrived at Berkeley in 1974 at the request of computer science Professor Bob fabry a symposium on operating system's principles Committee Member where Unix was first presented to run the system they bought a PDP 1145 but for budgetary reasons was shared with the mathematics and statistics groups at Berkeley who used rsts so Unix only ran on the machine eight hours per day but thanks to money from the Ingress database project a larger PDP 1170 was installed the following year finally BSD was able to come to life as a variant of Unix in the late 1970s at first BSD was not a clone of Unix or even a substantially different version of it it just included some extra features which were intertwined with the code owned by a t and on a sabbatical from Bell Labs the research arm of 18t where Unix was born and actually which city was developed but that's a story for another day Ken Thompson as a visiting professor at Berkeley helped to install version 6 Unix on the PDP 1170 and started working on a pascal implementation for the seabase system one that graduate students Chuck Haley and Bill Joy improved on by implementing an improved text editor other universities became interested in the software Berkeley and so in 1977 Joy started compiling the first Berkeley software distribution known as one BSD which was released on March 9 1978. it was an add-on to version 6 Unix rather than a complete operating system in its own right some 30 copies were sent out the second Berkeley software distribution or two BSD released in May of 1979 so just over a year after the release of one BSD it included updated versions of the one BSD software as well as two new programs by Bill Joy that persist on Unix systems to this day the V text editor and the seashell you may know the more popular derivatives of these Vim AKA V improved and tcsh the 10x seashell although bash a part of the gnu project has become more widely used as the default shell on many unix-like systems some 75 copies of two BSD were sent out by Bill Joy but one year prior in 1978 Berkeley installed a vax computer the port of Unix to this Vex architecture was called Unix 32v however this initial version did not leverage the vax's virtual memory capabilities recognizing the limitation the kernel of 32v underwent significant rewriting to integrate a virtual memory implementation by Berkeley graduate student ozop babaglu the result was a more comprehensive operating system 3bsd also known as virtual vax Unix or VM Unix released at the end of 1979 three BSD combined the newly developed kernel the utilities from 32v and the two BSD utilities ported to the Vex however the decision was made to transition away from the vax platform after the release of 4.3 BSD seven years later in June 1986. at that time the power 632 platform developed by computer consoles Incorporated and codenamed Tahoe seemed promising however this platform was shortly abandoned by its creators despite this the effort to Port 4.3 BSD to Tahoe resulting in the aptly named 4.3 BSD Tahoe released in June 1988 and it had a silver lining it spurred the separation of machine dependent and machine independent code in BSD significantly enhancing the system's portability in parallel the computer systems research group or csrg at Berkeley also focused on other advancements they developed an OSI Network protocol stack refined the Kernel's virtual memory system and collaborated with Van Jacobson from lbl to devise new tcpip algorithms to support the burgeoning internet and with the growth of the internet technological advancements software engineering and computer science research being exactly what we deliver to your inbox via our newsletter Dev notes your specialized briefing into this world tailored specifically for those who are building it the developers if you're interested sign up to our newsletter at devnosedaily.com Link in description up until this point all versions of BSD use proprietary at T Unix code and were therefore subject to a very expensive ATT software license anywhere from hundreds of dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on the version intended use hardware and time period which resulted in several outside parties being interested in a separate release of bsd's networking code developed entirely outside at T and would not be subject to the licensing requirement this led to networking release 1 AKA net one which was made available to non-licencies of ATT code and was freely redistributable under the terms of the BSD license it was released in June of 1989. following the momentum of net 1 BSD developer Keith Bostic proposed that more of bsd's non-atnt components be released under the same license to this end he started a project to recreate most of the standard Unix utilities without using the atnt code within 18 months all of the ATT utilities had been successfully replaced the few ATT files that remained in the current Journal were then removed and the result was the June 1991 release of networking release 2 also known as net2 marking a significant Milestone being a nearly complete operating system that was freely distributable building upon net 2 two distinct ports of BSD to the Intel 8386 architecture emerged notably this was the same architecture Linus torvill is used that led him to create the Linux kernel the first Port was the free 386 BSD developed by William and Lynn jolitz the second was the proprietary BSD 386 which was later renamed bsdos developed by Berkeley software design or bsdi while 386bsd was short-lived it became the initial code for the net BSD and FreeBSD projects that started soon after however bsdi soon found itself in legal trouble with att's Unix system Laboratories AKA USL subsidiary which at the time held the copyrights for Unix system 5 and the Unix trademark in 1992 the USL vbsdi lawsuit was filed and led to an injunction on the distribution of net 2 until the validity of usl's copyright claims on the source code could be determined the lawsuit inadvertently slowed development of bsd's free software descendants for nearly two years due to the uncertainty surrounding their legal standing and during this Hiatus systems based on the Linux kernel unhindered by such legal disputes gained Traction in a broader user base the lawsuit was finally settled in January 1994 largely favoring Berkeley out of the 18 000 files in the Berkeley distribution only three had to be removed while 70 others were modified to include USL copyright notices a pivotal term of the settlement ensured that USL would not file further lawsuits against either users or Distributors of the Berkeley owned code especially concerning the forthcoming 4.4 BSD release a few other derivatives of 4.4 BSD were released and then in 1995 Berkeley rolled out its final release 4.4 BSD Light released 2. this marked the end of an era as the csrg was dissolved in development of BSD at Berkeley ceased however the BSD Legacy persisted several variants either directly or indirectly based on 4.4 BSD light have been maintained such as FreeBSD netbsd openbsd and dragonfly BSD the permissive nature of the BSD license has allowed many other operating systems both open source and proprietary to incorporate BSD source code notably Microsoft Windows usbsd code for its tcpip implementation and has bundled recompiled versions of bsd's command line networking tools since Windows 2000 Darwin which forms the foundation of Apple's Mac OS and iOS is based on 4.4 BSD Lite 2 and FreeBSD various commercial Unix operating systems such as Solaris also Incorporated BSD code it's quite amazing isn't it just how impactful BSD has been on the software many of us use and love to this day 28 years after being discontinued and to think if that lawsuit that held up development of the free software descendants of BSD for nearly two years never happened BSD could very well be what Linux is today and to answer the question of was BSD the first complete open source operating system actually the answer is blurred BSD became a complete operating system well before Linux in 1979 with the release of three BSD and while it was distributed with source code it had a permissive license in it's still included proprietary ATT code which makes it inconsistent with the modern sense of the term open source net 1 and net 2 ran into the same issue of proprietary ATT code and neither was quite a complete operating system it wasn't until 386 BSD that we got a complete open source operating system in the BSD family and that was released on July 14 1992 around the same time as gnu Linux which begs the question given the combination of gnu tools with the Linux kernel was more of an evolutionary process rather than a single event to determine an exact date in which it became a complete operating system which was first some say the February 3rd 1992 released of the Manchester Computing Center interim Linux created by Owen LeBlanc others say differently what do you say you may say it doesn't matter and maybe not but where's the fun in that y'all let me know this story was not to answer that question but instead to share story of one of the most influential pieces of software in history BSD if you haven't seen the making of Linux you can check that out here right below it the making of gnu and I have two more videos in the works just like this telling the story of some of the most important software of the past that shaped our present not just the software of today but the entire software development industry that by the way was your indication to subscribe I hope you truly enjoyed this video and have a newfound appreciation for software and developers of the past

Channel: ForrestKnight

Views: 37,696

Keywords: open source, gnu/linux (operating system), open source software, open source news, open source objects, open source contribution, free software, gnu history, free software foundation, bsd, berkeley unix, unix, vi, vim, bsd history, open source history, bill joy, ken thompson, bsd documentary, bsd os, linux, gnu, history

Id: tuI2wX3ol2o

Length: 12min 35sec (755 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 13 2023