Concept in Definition ABC

It is one of the branches of the family of Unix systems, and has resulted in a whole series of platforms known for their great stability and safety. I present to you BSD, Berkeley Software Distribution.

Story

It was born as a variant of the original Unix at the University of California at Berkeley in the mid-2000s, taking advantage of the availability of the Unix source code, with which programmers could not only see their insides to learn, but could also modify it.

And that's what the professionals of the computing of Berkeley, who modified the original Unix that came to them (a version 6) to improve, specifically, the Pascal language that it carried for learning of his students, although they also introduced modifications in the way the system started.

These modifications were of interest to other universities, which requested Berkeley's permission to use them on their computers.

Seeing the interest generated, in 1977 the first version of BSD Unix was distributed, then packaged on magnetic tape. This was possible thanks to the fact that the Bell laboratories of AT&T (where the legendary Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan among others, had created Unix) had a

politics very lax about giving up Unix and allowing its modification.

But that policy came to an end in the mid / late 1980s, in which AT&T tightened conditions and raised the prices to use its source code, in such a way that it led those interested in modifying Unix to look for alternatives.

At Berkeley they took advantage of their knowledge of Unix and everything they had been developing to improve the original from AT&T who in 1989 released the first version of BSD that did not include source code for that.

BSD was then already on version 4. The last one launched by the University of Berkeley itself was 4.4, but if you have reached this point and you think that the story ends here, nothing is further from it, because it has just begun ...

The long shadow of BSD in modern computing

Berkeley shut down BSD, but in a phenomenon we have grown accustomed to in our day, various groups of enthusiasts They took advantage of the Internet to get together and work as a team, creating variations of the Unix BSD that emphasized various aspects concrete.

This is how projects were born that are still alive today, very active, and play an important role in the ecosystem technology in which we operate: FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD.

Also the companies of computing they took the base of BSD for their own developments; This was the case with Sun Microsystems, which, although later changed the basis from its proprietary Unix to AT & T's System V, initially relied on it for BSD.

It was also the case of a company called NeXT, today unknown to the youngest but the most veteran We will remember how Steve Jobs's attempt to re-enter the world of computing after his expulsion from Manzana.

Following its re-entry into the apple company, NextStep was chosen as the future successor to MacOS, giving it a more traditional look. operating system from Apple and with some backwards compatibility using software gimmicks.

In this way, Mac OS X was born, an operating system that looks modern but whose heart it is directly related to that modified Unix at the University of California at Berkeley.

BSD is an acronym that has meant and continues to mean a lot in the world of computing, as synonyms for robustness, effectiveness and security.

Photos: iStock - virtualphoto / lvcandy

Topics in BSD