PDP-8
I’m going to fire up NomadBSD later today – if nothing else to pay homage to the pioneers and as a reminder not to take our software freedom for granted – be it gpl or bsd style.
I also tend to forget that aside from legal / freedom issues, the groundbreaking work Jolitz did was to actually get a port to the 386 working at all! Which compared to the previous generation of minis and workstations, that meant more or less “toy” or commodity PC hardware, where internal documentation and the circus of off-the-shelf hardware meant that unless you were Microsoft, you weren’t going to get any help. Or be privy to secret bios calls, or secret calls in assembler.
Which for various reasons morphed from 386BSD into Net and Free BSD – still facing the same challenge, unlike the others who spent their time on fully supported mini hardware.
I guess we are /still/ living with that spectre of commodity pc hardware secrecy and hoarding today in one form or another.
Yep – gonna’ fire up NomadBSD and spend some time with it. It fits exactly into FreeBSD’s original charter, which was to make installation and operation on commodity pc hardware easier to get up and running for the average Joe/Jill to explore and learn from.