The history of BSD Unix ports to 1990s home computers: Amiga, Atari Falcon, and Acorn RiscPC
By
Miod Vallat
Kettled twice. Extra chewy, extra trustworthy.
Summary
This article discusses the history of porting BSD Unix-like operating systems to home computers in the 1990s, specifically focusing on efforts to port BSD to the Commodore Amiga, Atari Falcon, and Acorn RiscPC. These porting efforts eventually merged into NetBSD, with the RiscPC port initially called RiscBSD. The article appears to be a historical technical retrospective about early open-source operating system development for alternative computing platforms.
Key quotes
· 3 pulledDuring the 1990s, some users of home computers wanted to be able to run a Unix-like operating system on their machines.
There was a group of people working on porting the BSD codebase to the Commodore Amiga, another to the Atari Falcon, and in the United Kingdom, another group working on porting BSD to the Acorn RiscPC.
Eventually, all these BSD porting efforts merged in NetBSD, in which the port to the RiscPC, initially called RiscBSD
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