William and Lynne Jolitz Celebrate
"Porting UNIX to the 386" Article Series
15th Year brings restored series
out into public access
(March 17, 2006) LOS GATOS,
CALIF. William and Lynne Jolitz, creators of 386BSD, celebrate the 15
year anniversary of the article series that started Open Source systems. Along
with reacquiring all rights to 386BSD from CMP Publishing, to recapture that
revolutionary moment they have spent countless hours restoring the articles from
notes, e-mails, written correspondance and the rememberances of team members. As
the articles are restored, they may be found on the website http://porting-unix-to-the-386.jolix.com
.
"Most people don't know about the limits
of space in a publication", said Lynne Jolitz. "We had to edit severely due to
space considerations every month, so quite a bit of good stuff got on the
cutting room floor". The series covered all aspects of the project, from its
inception in mid-1989 as a personal project done under the auspices of
the University of California at Berkeley to its first complete operational
open source release on March 17th, 1992 of 386BSD Release 0.0 -- 386BSD releases
are officially 14 years old today.
"There's a lot about the original
genesis of Open Source that has remained clouded", said William Jolitz. "In the
rush to work on the project, write an article series, and negotiate with
University and other parties, there simply wasn't enough time to sift through
intrigue and rumor. We chose to carefully communicate what was happening in real
time through the article series as a technical tour-de-force."
No only did "Porting UNIX" have a major
impact on Open Source Berkeley Systems, it has also been written up by many
others as the goad to Linus Torvalds, a reader of the series, to begin
serious work on LINUX. Linus even contributed an early floating point emulator
he had written for inclusion in 386BD Release 0.1(July 1992). Many open source
pioneers have claimed that this article series spurred them to begin their own
work in open source projects such as Apache. Lynne Jolitz received an Oracle
E-Business award in 2001 for technical innovations in 386BSD as well as her
subsequent work in very high speed TCP/IP communications in silicon, for which
she has received granted patents.
Dan Kusnetzky, former IDC analyst and now EVP of
marketing strategy of Open-Xchange, says "BSD is a project that made a major
contribution to the world of IT. In its early days it contributed to Sun's
SunOS, IBM'S AIX, and HP's HP-UX. The contribution didn't end there. It's at the
heart of Apple's MacOS"
As the articles are restored in full,
relevent observations, reminiscences and accounts from the open source
community as they become available.
Contact: