Bill Jolitz has died
In many ways 386bsd in &#x27;92 was a flawed jewel. What it did is point the way, bust open a door. IIRC The first AT&amp;T lawsuit was still going on, the SCO version of that farce was yet to arrive and we were living in a world where people with BSD copyright include files in AT&amp;T licenced code were watching AT&amp;T try to argue BSD were the bad guys.<p>Bill and Lynn were holding on to an idea and put something out there which lit a fire under a community, used to Berkeley licenced code.<p>Dr Dobbs helped. The work Keith Bostic started in the eighties unwinding att sourced code was huge too.<p>It wasn&#x27;t complete but it was enough. Sometimes, &quot;enough&quot; is what we need.<p>I had access to BSD tapes, ran vaxes, sun&#x27;s and the like, I&#x27;d done my time on pdp11s. Being able to move that experience beyond the IBM pc-rt (there was a licenced BSD port to the romp chip) onto the emerging commodity hardware pc was amazing.<p>Maybe the real firelighter moment was the mmu enabled 386?