BSD - Berkeley Software Distribution

[Stephen Badgett]

What does bsd - Berkeley Software Distribution have to do with files on the HP-UX machine? To me this soulnds like an odd question but I waws ask it and need your help in understanding it

[Mark Greene_1 · Accepted solution]

BSD was a variant of AT&T Unix done by Bill Joy at UC Berkeley. IBM's AIX is BSD-like, Sun even more so. HP-UX is mostly an AT&T System V -like implementation of Unix. You can see a comparison of various commands here:

http://www.unixguide.net/unixguide.pdf


mark

[A. Clay Stephenson]

HP-UX is a Berkeley-based (ie BSD) UNIX as opposed to AT&T (Bell Labs) based UNIX --- what I consider to be "real" UNIX but only because that's what I started on. Probably the most direct link to files is the hfs filesystem which is a direct counterpart to the BSD ufs filesystem. There are other file distinctions and one that comes immediately to mind are the differences in the Berkeley-style and AT&T-style tape behaviors. This is one area where BSD got it right; the AT&T convention is simply insane.

[Arunvijai_4]

Hi Steve,

Using NFS, you can easily share files with HP-UX and BSD. Probably, this wikipedia article should give more information about BSD

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution

-Arun

[Geoff Wild]

Here's the history of Unix:

http://www.unix.org/what_is_unix/history_timeline.html

HPUX is based on the System 5.

System V has been considered one of the two major flavours of UNIX, the other being BSD.

More @ wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_V

Rgds...Geoff

[David Markus]

Here's a nicely done graphical timeline of the most used Unixes : http://www.levenez.com/unix/ , just to give you an idea of who 'borrowed' from who...

[Jeff_Traigle]

These days, most vendors have borrowed so much from both BSD and System V that it's difficult to say that they are one or the other. HP-UX was more BSD-like in the pre-10.X days, but has incorporated many of the System V-isms since then. The same with SunOS prior to v5.X (Solaris 2.X). I was trying to find a really cool graphic that showed the relationships between the various flavors that I remember seeing somewhere, but I haven't been able to find it online with a Google search. Maybe it's in a book I have. I'll have to search through the likely candidates in my library when I get home. If I manage to find it, I'll let you know. The timelines the others have posted probably depict the same thing, but I found them rather difficult to follow... more suited to printing out and hanging on a wall to view, I think.

[Stephen Badgett]

This is some great stuff -- I have enjoyed going over all of them

thank you,
Steve

[Ralph Grothe]

I also once bookmarked a link to the chart that David's link refers to.
Glad I rediscovered thanks to Dave.

Click on the chart there to see a spaghetti like entanglement of bewildering ramnifications of various Unices.

As far as I remember BSD (which is often referred to as the genuine Unix) was started at AT&T by Ritchie and Thompson
originally as a joint project why its name should have been Multics.
Soon AT&T lost interest (partly because they were struggling at the time with plans of divestiture, similar to Microsoft lately) and the venture partners quickly withdrew.
Rumor had it that this was the reason they changed the name from Multics to Unix.
Because AT&T considered Unix futile they gave it away (on tapes, the foundation of the famous Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD)) to the University of California Berkeley (UCB) for educational tinkering.
So BSD students like Bill Joy (who later became one of the founders of SUN further developed the code (I think vi and other venerable Unix tools were written by Joy))
and Kirk McKusick who was a major contributor to the BSD filesystem (in a way the founding father of Unix filesystems).
Later when the industry rediscovered that Unix was more than an OS for computer games on a PDP-7 they founded the OSF.
Meanwhile AT&T also revived interest in Unix and formed a joint with SUN who at the time were fully on the BSD track since their technical founders inculcated their own BSD code.
That was when the trouble started for the UCB BSD since now there where right and license proprietors (SCO Group, the ones who recently have been claiming that the Linux folks stole their code),
although by the time the BSD code was completely rewritten, and there were no remnants of AT&T left in it.

I'm not sure when HP-UX came into play
(the mentioned chart should show),
but I think it wasn't before the 80s.
When I first got set loose on an HP-UX box there was already 11 around which is less BSD but more SysV.
I think to have read that a major change must have been taken place between the 9 and 10 releases.

Because SunOS (later to become Solaris) started as very BSD like its origins are very conspicuous, especially when you are formatting or rather labelling and vtoc-ing a disk.
Oddly there is still a /usr/ucb subdir
which holds a set of BSD binaries,
I think for compatibility reasons of scripts that use BSD style syntax (e.g. ps command)

[Arunvijai_4]

Hi Steve,

Some more links that talks about history of Unix

http://www.computerhope.com/history/unix.htm
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/hp/hpux-faq/section-5.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-UX

-Arun