After 22 Years, 386BSD Gets An Update (386bsd.org)

386BSD was last released back in 1994 with a series of articles in Dr. Dobb's Journal -- but then developers for this BSD-based operating system started migrating to both FreeBSD and NetBSD. An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: The last known public release was version 0.1. Until Wednesday, when Lynne Jolitz, one of the co-authors of 386BSD, released the source code to version 1.0 as well as 2.0 on Github.

386BSD takes us back to the days when you could count every file in your Unix distribution and more importantly, read and understand all of your OS source code. 386BSD is also the missing link between BSD and Linux. One can find fragments of Linus Torvalds's math emulation code in the source code of 386BSD. To quote Linus: "If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened."
Though it was designed for Intel 80386 microprocessors, there's already instructions for launching it on the hosted hardware virtualization service Qemu.

Comments

Bizarre and nonsensical summary as usual.

[Anonymous Coward]

... What? Somebody makes 386BSD and releases version 0.1... and then works not only on a full, shiny 1.0, but also on a whole new generation (2.0)... and don't release the two latter ones? Just develop them and sit on them? What?! That's the real news. Not even an attempt to explain it, of course, so one is left with a hundred questions instead of learning anything.

Re:Bizarre and nonsensical summary as usual.

[TheRaven64]

He's probably thinking of the 486DX. The original 486 had an FPU, but the yields were low so Intel split the line into the 486SX (no FPU) and the 486DX (with FPU). Some motherboards let you plug in a 487 as an external FPU, but this was often really just a 486DX that took over completely. The 486SX was identical to the DX, but had the FPU disabled. It was possible to reenable it, and it would typically work most of the time. For gaming, this was fine (the occasional floating point error probably didn't make a difference) and was a cheap way of getting much more performance.

Hope for Hurd yet?

[Mostly a lurker]

Hurd comes from the same era. I think some people are still tinkering with it.

Internet's early days

[Neo-Rio-101]

Interesting. An ISP I worked at used BSDi in it's formative years.... the proprietary version of BSD from which 386BSD originated.
The ISP runs FreeBSD now, of course.

Speaking of which.... FreeBSD 11 is due for release any day now....