Talks to Watch

Kirk McKusick - A Narrative History of BSD

17K views · Nov 17, 2014 · 47:51 · 1 HN recommender · 3 mentions · discussed 2020–2025

Kirk McKusick gives a narrative history of the Berkeley Software Distributions at MeetBSD California. He covers how BSD originated and evolved, including the origin of the networking releases.

Why Hacker News points people here: Recommended as the authoritative, first-hand telling of BSD lore whenever Unix and BSD history comes up.

“Maybe you have some fun with BSD-Lore (Kirk McKusick)”HN comment, 2020

What Hacker News said 3

Recommendsnix23Jun 2020

“Maybe you have some fun with BSD-Lore (Kirk McKusick)”

Kirk McKusick on BSD lore

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Yep, that! Maybe you have some fun with BSD-Lore (Kirk McKusick): this video Or Solaris/illumos (Bryan M. Cantrill): link

Cites itpjmlpNov 2020

“Marshall Kirk McKusick has done some talks on the subject.”

Talk by McKusick on the history of BSD.

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"Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, The, 2nd Edition" link Marshall Kirk McKusick has done some talks on the subject. this video link link link

in “The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan” · view on HN
Cites itdamhsaApr 2025

“see kirk mckusicks history”

McKusick's history of BSD, including the origin of internet networking releases.

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i didnt understand it until i stumbled on the bsd supp docs that openbsd couldnt be ****** to include. i dont have the sources, but v7 vol2 is close enough: link vol2 contains fuller book like manuals and tutorials for complicated things like ed, C, filesystem, UNIX, etc. and should be your first introduction to UNIX/BSD, while the man(1) program (vol1) serves as a complementary quick reference for experienced users and for short programs that dont need much explanation. sadly V7 wont tell you about the internet because that was started by the "net" releases of 4.3-4.4BSD (see kirk mckusicks history this video ) for vi, get the PostScript.ps files for the OTHER manual from keith bostics sources (openbsd src only has troff source and no troff): link echo pkg_add ghostscript | su root tar xfz nvi-1.79.tar.gz cd nvi-1.79/docs/USD.doc (cd vi.ref; ps2pdf vi.ref.ps) (cd vi.tut; ps2pdf vi.tut.ps) the interactive vi tutorial is also great: cp /usr/src/usr.bin/vi/docs/tutorial/* ./ vi vi.beginner vi vi.advanced assuming you installed the relevant src tar: ftp -C link -r`"/SHA256.sig && ftp -C link -r`"/src.tar.gz && signify -Cp /etc/signify/openbsd-"`uname -r|tr -d .`"-base.pub -x SHA256.sig src.tar.gz && su root -c 'tar xfzCp src.tar.gz' wouldnt it be nice if installation did this and syspatch patched it and sysupgrade merged it? openbsd is also not very good at pointing you to the right manual. making them grepable was a small improvement for me. mkdir man && cd man && for n in

in “Dipping my toes in OpenBSD, in Amsterdam” · view on HN