A Narrative History of BSD, Dr. Kirk McKusick
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as an engaging, non-technical history of Unix and BSD from someone who was there, and cited for specific stories like the TCP/IP stack.
What it is
Kirk McKusick gives a narrative history of BSD from its start at UC Berkeley in the late 1970s through the 1980s releases and the lawsuit that led to 4.4BSD-Lite in 1992. It is full of anecdotes from a key developer.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2013 to 2017.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec chubot · 2013-10 · on “The Government Shutdown Has Revealed Silicon Valley’s Dysfunction Fetish”
EDIT: Watch this video for details! [this video] Key quotes around 8:30 - 9:00, but the whole thing is excellent. DARPA was funding all sorts of different networking and operating systems, which in those days were all incompatible. But they wanted them to cooperate, hence open source BSD and the Internet. Silicon Valley doesn't get this kind of cooperation. In stark contrast, a proven business tactic is to undermine cooperation by poisoning open standards (e.g. embrace and extend).
Recommends networked · 2014-04 · on “Ask HN: Your favorite YouTube channels?”
BSDs, game design and computer history: — [LINK] collects talks from various BSD conferences. An interesting non-technical talk from the collection is "A Narrative History of BSD" by Marshall Kirk McKusick ( [this video] ). — [LINK] — lectures on game design and development by Chris Crawford ( Balance of Power , The Art of Computer Game Design ) uploaded by the man himself. "The Dragon Speech" of his can be found elsewhere on YouTube ( [LINK] ). — [LINK] — early computer graphics demo reels, mostly from the '80s.
Recommends pjmlp · 2017-02 · on “Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave”
If you have some time to refresh memory. "A Narrative History of BSD by Dr. Kirk McKusick" [this video] "Unix came into many CS departments largely because it was the only powerful interactive system that could run on the sort of hardware (PDP-11s) that universities could afford in the mid '70s. In addition, Unix itself was also very inexpensive. Since source code was provided, it was a system that could be shaped to the requirements of a particular installation." [LINK]
Cites krylon · 2016-04 · on “Backslash must die”
There is a talk by Kirk McKusick on YouTube[1] where he tells about that time, and IIRC, Bill Joy got his hands on an early version of BBN's code, started hacking on it and put it into BSD. BBN and DARPA were not very amused, but by the time BBN's stack was finished, the BSD version had better performance and/or lower packet loss, so it stuck. Apparently Mike Muuss compared the two implementations, and his recommendation to go with Bill Joy's code was the decisive factor. [1] [this video] - I think that's the one