Subject: Re: NetBSD and my life... (fwd)
To: Stephen Borrill <netbsd@precedence.co.uk>
From: Hubert Feyrer <hubert@feyrer.de>
List: netbsd-advocacy
Date: 09/13/2005 18:39:28
> After the PhD, I decided that academia wasn't for me and so got a job at
> Acorn in tech support. The company then merged with Apple to become Acorn and
> Apple's sole provider to education in the UK. A new client came out which
> booted using bootp and NFS with no local storage. I took it and got it to
> boot from NetBSD. The company ran with this and we launched in January 1997
> (using 1.2G IIRC). We sold these systems to schools all over the UK (so Apple
> UK were effectively selling BSD boxes into schools years before MacOS X). In
> 1999, Apple bought out the whole company and anything non-Apple got dumped. I
> took all the IPR and set up my own company to continue development. We
> rebranded it and moved to Intel hardware. NetBSD's single source tree and
> cross-platform ability meant this was very easy). We expanded the services it
> provided and to this day continue to sell Internet/security servers to
> schools throughout the UK (In fact, I'm currently typing this on such a
> machine out on site while their Windows server rebuilds after a crash). See
> http://www.netmanager.info/
>
> We are also heavily into Citrix and thin-client computing. We sell a product
> based on NetBSD which converts pretty much any old PC into a
> centrally-managed thin-client. This is installed in the hundreds at some
> schools. We are also due to launch our own range of thin-client hardware at
> the end of the month which is, once again, NetBSD based (this time running
> 3.0_BETA and waiting for a full release!). http://www.thinit.info/
That's very interesting! I couldn't find any of the pages on the two
domains say it's based on NetBSD, are there any? We'd definitely like to
list your products in the NetBSD Gallery!
- Hubert