On Sun, 20 Aug 2000, Rakhesh Sasidharan wrote:

> On Sat, 19 Aug 2000, Ben Collver wrote:
> 
> :   I am curious about NetBSD's history.  Does someone
> : know of a good page describing it?

  /usr/share/misc/bsd-family-tree is a good timeline.  Lites info is still
available at http://www.cs.hut.fi/~jvh/lites.html, though it seems that
the only release was in 1995 and the project is quite dead now.

  NetBSD was based on 386BSD 0.1 and 4.3BSD Net/2.  NetBSD 1.0 included
updates from 4.4BSD-Lite.  I believe Lites was based on NetBSD 1.0 and
could use either NetBSD 1.0 or FreeBSD 2.0 userland. 

> :   One thing I am curious about is NetBSD's
> : relationship to Lites.  If I understand right, Lites
> : is a BSD personality which runs on top of Mach.  I
> : remember reading not long ago that NetBSD switched to
> : UVM from a vm system that had descended from Mach. 
> : Does that mean that at one time NetBSD ran on Mach?  I
> : didn't think so, but as you can see I am clueless
> : here.

  No, I believe mach VM was used because it was freely available and a
whole lot better then the previous VM system.  It was present in the Net/2
release and 4.4BSD.

> For a history of Unix, check out any book (eg. Design & Implementation of
> the 4.4 BSD system).  It will give you info abt how Unix began, and its
> various descendants, the lawsuit etc. all the way to 4.4BSD-Net2.  Also,
> seaching on Google for BSD or Lites should also give info.

  _The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD OS_ is probably not the
best book to get just for history, unless you are also interested in a
kernel overview.

Matthew Orgass
darkstar@pgh.net