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Kirk McKusick - A Narrative History of BSD

3 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
1 HN user recommended this talk1 month2020–2025 score 1
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Recommended as the authoritative, first-hand telling of BSD lore whenever Unix and BSD history comes up.

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.

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

1 recommendations · 2 citations · Talks

3 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@nix23 Jun 2020 Recommends
on HN thread Linux Sucks 2020 [video]
Yep, that! Maybe you have some fun with BSD-Lore (Kirk McKusick): [this video] Or Solaris/illumos (Bryan M. Cantrill): [link]
Kirk McKusick on BSD lore

Citations, criticism and jokes

@pjmlp Nov 2020 Cites it
on HN thread The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan
"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]
Talk by McKusick on the history of BSD.
@damhsa Apr 2025 Cites it
on HN thread Dipping my toes in OpenBSD, in Amsterdam
Read more
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
McKusick's history of BSD, including the origin of internet networking releases.

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