That's wild. <4BSD was never on my radar at all, from my first encounters in 1990.
Morally, this isn't really 2.11 anymore after so much backporting and updating, so my questions would be, what's the utility of such a platform, if not nostalgia or legacy support?
Not clear which arches are supported, aside from i386. My love affair with Open/NetBSD was partially sparked by its enormous roster of cool hardware support.
1989-90 you could still dial in to "Nyx", a PDP-11 at University of Denver, running 2.? BSD. The big attraction was Usenet access, Nyx probably got it via uucp.
Universities maintained legacy systems for sure, but in 1989, 4.3 was already a mature, gold standard, for the right hardware.
Personally I was put on SVR3/3B2, and SunOS on IPX/SLC type systems, along with an awareness of all kinds of other stuff available there, such as a "recreational" 4.3BSD VAX.
I have periodically wondered why we didn't see more of that. It's a small monolithic Unix with the complete stack, including (now rather ancient) TCP/IP networking. Fits in 1 MB of RAM with room to spare. BSD licenced.
From what I remember off the biggest issues are probably that: 1) it is pretty closely tied to the PDP-11 architecture (though not insurmountably) 2) it's pre-ANSI C.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 53.1 ms ] threadMorally, this isn't really 2.11 anymore after so much backporting and updating, so my questions would be, what's the utility of such a platform, if not nostalgia or legacy support?
Not clear which arches are supported, aside from i386. My love affair with Open/NetBSD was partially sparked by its enormous roster of cool hardware support.
Personally I was put on SVR3/3B2, and SunOS on IPX/SLC type systems, along with an awareness of all kinds of other stuff available there, such as a "recreational" 4.3BSD VAX.
I have periodically wondered why we didn't see more of that. It's a small monolithic Unix with the complete stack, including (now rather ancient) TCP/IP networking. Fits in 1 MB of RAM with room to spare. BSD licenced.
From what I remember off the biggest issues are probably that: 1) it is pretty closely tied to the PDP-11 architecture (though not insurmountably) 2) it's pre-ANSI C.
https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.11BSD/sys/netin...
to my surprise 2.9 does as well
https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.9BSD/usr/net/sy...
https://github.com/AaronJackson/2.11BSD/blob/main/sys/netine...
Depends on the version though. There's a bunch of patches made to 2.11BSD over the unstoppable march of time.
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/2.11BSD/Patch...
However when trying to fact check myself, I found many of the architecture targets are 32-bit, so I may be wrong about this.
see also: retrobsd a 2bsd fork
https://github.com/RetroBSD/retrobsd