Introduction to Unix and FreeBSD
In the late 1960's Ken Thompson at AT&T Bell Laboratories had written a computer game called Space Travel. Thompson played Space Travel on Bell Labs' GE 645 mainframe which ran an operating system called MULTICS. Computer users had to pay for time on the mainframe, so in order to have more time for playing Space Travel, Thompson put into service a DEC PDP-7 sitting idle at Bell Labs. He collaborated with his Bell Labs colleague Dennis Ritchie to write an operating system to run on the PDP-7 and then he rewrote Space Travel to run on the new OS. He called the new operating system UNICS (his rib at the MULTICS operating system project which turned out to be very non-productive.)UNICS evolved into UNIX which was first released in 1971.
In 1973 the Fourth Edition of Unix was released. It was completely rewritten in the C programming language making it easily portable to a variety of computer platforms.
Beginning in 1973, AT&T shared UNIX's source code with many universities and companies, including the University of California - Berkley. This code was used to teach courses in Operating System Design, and the students made many extensions to it.Then in 1974 Thompson himself went to UC Berkeley to teach for a year. In late 1977, the University released its first version of UNIX named BSD(Berkley Standard Distribution). BSD1 incorporated student work, but its distribution required a license from AT&T, since the code contained some copyrighted material from them.
Programmers at the University of California continued working on the source code AT&T had released and BSD became an important variant of Unix. Unix and BSD are design chiefly for networking and running server applications configured at the command prompt.When BSD 4.2 was released in 1984, it found wide usage in both universities and corporate computing environments.
The FreeBSD project began in 1993 when Jordan K. Hubbard, Nate Williams, and Rod Grimes used source code fom 386BSD (BSD ported to x86 architecture) to create FreeBSD. They relaeased FreeBSD 1.0 in December of 1993, but legal issues concerning 386BSD caused them to re-engineer much of the operating system using code from 4.4BSD-Lite. In November of 1994 they realeased FreeBSD 2.0 which was based on 4.4BSD-Lite.
Today you can download FreeBSD 6.2 from the FreeBSD website. If you are interested in obtaining, installing and running FreeBSD. It can be downloaded for free at FreeBSD
