BSD Unix History

Unix Started in AT&T Bell Labs in 1969. At time time is was freely shared as "scrap" The Berkely BSD 4.2 1983 OS was the first OS to support TCP/IP.
The Unix wars were the struggles between vendors of the Unix computer operating system in the late 1980s and early 1990s to set the standard for Unix henceforth. These battles are commonly held to have harmed the market acceptance of Unix and created a market gap that allowed the rise of Windows NT.

In the mid-1980s, the two common versions of Unix were BSD, from the University of California at Berkeley BSD4.2 released in 1983 , and System V, from AT&T. Both were derived from the earlier Version 7 Unix, but had diverged considerably. (This conflict was also known as the "UNIX wars" to some degree.) Further, each vendor's version of Unix was different to a greater or lesser degree.


A group of vendors formed the X/Open standards group in 1984, with the aim of forming compatible open systems. They chose to base their system on Unix.


X/Open caught AT&T's attention. To increase the uniformity of Unix, AT&T and leading BSD Unix vendor Sun Microsystems started work in 1987 on a unified system. This was eventually released as System V Release 4 (SVR4).

While this decision was applauded by customers and the trade press, other Unix licensees feared Sun would be unduly advantaged. They formed the Open Software Foundation (OSF), who released OSF/1, more closely based on BSD. AT&T and another group of licensees then formed UNIX International.

Technical issues soon took a back seat to vicious and public commercial competition between the two competing "open" versions of Unix, with X/Open holding the middle ground.

Linux kernel based on rewrite of Minux was released to the Internet in September 1991,

The first open source Unix port began in 1989 with 386BSD and first, incomplete traces of the port can be found in 4.3BSD NET/2 of 1991. It was first released in March 1992 (version 0.0) and in a much more usable version on July 14, 1992 (version 0.1).

Due to a lawsuit by AT&T, USL v. BSDi, some potentially so-called encumbered sources which existed within 386BSD were to be removed from all the derived systems, and the distribution of 386BSD was to be stopped. In late 1993


In 1993, AT&T sold Unix to Novell, who assigned trademark rights to X/Open. In 1996, X/Open and the OSF merged to form the Open Group, whose Single UNIX Specification is now the single standard for proprietary Unix. However, the damage to Unix's market share had been done.

BSD Unix

The BSD varients (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, etc) are UNIX based operating systems
that work on Intel PC based systems that have a reputation for being highly optimised,
highly secure and excellent (when decently configured) for keeping hackers at bay.


Linux does not compare all that well to BSD: having a reputation of being
a hacker's paradise to break into compared to BSD (FreeBSD at least).
FreeBSD (and the other BSD's) run some of the most intensely hit servers
on the globe, including ftp://ftp.cdrom.com. It can be said that the nicest
thing you can do for a hacker is replace Windows with Linux as not only is it
potentially easier to hack (one of the benefits of open source), but the system
becomes worth hacking into. The same cannot necessarily be said with BSD based UNIX's
which are built of sterner stuff to keep hackers at bay.


Thus the BSD based operating systems of which FreeBSD is one - have a reputation of being
better designed (by gurus no less!), more secure (and more security
conscious) and more robust than most other operating systems (including
Linux - an operating system - it is claimed - "written by kiddies - for kiddies").
Refer to:
FreeBSD, OpenBSD and SuSE 6.2 Eval Review by Keith Rankin: "The differences between
FreeBSD and Linux used to be much more obvious than they are now.
Now it comes down to theology. The BSD world is still the 'high church' or Druid Unix. Blood will
be spilled on a stone altar at midnite when star systems are in
a certain alignment to learn the ways of this tribe. Linux is a
happier world. The spirits of Captain Kirk, Peter Pan and good beer come to mind."

("Buckets of Blood" and non-alcoholic prudery is official CCP14 computer operating system policy)