An OutoftheMain Activity 3796

A company called BSDi did a lot of work to bring the BSDs to the marketplace. They released BSD-386 as a commercial offering around 1990. That included source. The price was not too bad, about twice the price of QNX. It ran pretty well on a 386, provided you didn't skimp on memory or cache.

We all knew that BSD was coming along; and Linus' endeavour made that a certainty. They just couldn't surrender the reference OS platform to a finnish university student.

Gnu stuff was available about 12 hours after its release, and lots of people from Scandinavia participated actively.

The Internet brought it over pretty fast. Remember that Norway and Sweden were the third and sixth countries on the Internet, and were connected as early as the mid seventies. There were glitches though.

I remember being present at the reorganisation meeting of usenet and internet services in 1986, where Norsk Data was debuttigned from all commitments and USIT plus the Kongsberg group took over responsabilities.

That was the access provided to the mbuttes. SUnet had external TCP-IP links well established by the mid 1980's. 1984 is known here as "the year of no connectivity" becuase of the belated problems if cutover from Arpanet to TCP-IP, and asociated mail + usenet problems. Stating "no connectivity" was wrong, there was a functional network; but it didn't reach quite all the way to the end users; lots of ad-hoc gateway services were needed.

Taking up programming is a very individual thing.

-- mrr