path: root/handbook/history.sgml

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<sect><heading>A brief history of FreeBSD</heading>

<p><em>Contributed by &a.jkh;</em>.

The FreeBSD project was started somewhere in the early part of 1992 as
an outgrowth of the "Unofficial 386BSD Patchkit" by the patchkit's
last 3 coordinators: Nate Williams, Jordan Hubbard and Rod Grimes.
David Greenman and Julian Elischer were also lurking in the background
around this time, though they didn't come fully into the project until
a month or two after it was more or less officially launched.  The
original working title of the project was also "386BSD 0.5" or "386BSD
Interim", a reference to the fact that the original goal was to
produce an intermediate snapshot of 386BSD.  

386BSD was Bill Jolitz's operating system, which had been up to
that point suffering rather severely from neglect, a consequence
of which was to cause the patchkit to swell ever more
uncomfortably with each passing day.  The 3 ex-patchkit
coordinators were all in agreement that the patchkit had to die.
It was rapidly outliving its usefulness, and it would be a far
easier thing to simply do another 386BSD release with all patches
applied and a number of its aging utilities updated.

These plans came to a rude halt when Bill Jolitz suddenly decided
to withdraw his sanction from the project.  It didn't take the
team members long to decide that the goal remained worthwhile
even without Bill's support, and so they adopted the name
"FreeBSD", which was coined by David Greenman.  

Once it also became clear that the project was on the road to
perhaps even becoming a reality, Jordan Hubbard contacted Walnut
Creek CDROM with an eye towards improving FreeBSD's distribution
channels to those many unfortunates without easy access to the
Internet.  Walnut Creek CDROM not only supported the idea of
distributing FreeBSD on CD, but went so far as to provide the
project with a machine to work on and a fast Internet connection.
Without Walnut Creek CDROM's almost unprecidented degree of faith
in what was, at the time, a completely unknown project, it is
very unlikely that FreeBSD would have gotten as far, as fast, as
it has today.