F/OSS Comics #13: BSD Unix, Part 3 – The Beginning of BSD Unix
- ID
- 42075
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 02 Nov 2026, 9:59 AM
- Fetched
- 03 Nov 2026, 1:29 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://fosscomics.com/posts/13.%20BSD%20Unix%20Part%203%20-%20The%20Beginning%20of%20BSD%20Unix/
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 3.0
- Created
- 03 Nov 2026, 1:29 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developers
What happened
Part 3 of the F/OSS Comics BSD Unix series covers 1977-78: Bill Joy bundled the Pascal system with ex into the first Berkeley Software Distribution, sending about 30 tapes in its first year, then shipped 2BSD with vi and the C shell to nearly 75 tapes — each requiring an AT&T Unix source license, with Berkeley charging only for tape and postage. When a VAX arrived at Berkeley in 1978, graduate student Ozalp Babaoglu worked on adding virtual memory to Bell Labs' 32/V, with Joy helping integrate and debug the code.
Why it matters
There is no actionable takeaway here for anyone shipping software today — this is a historical comic, not a release, incident, or measurement. The one detail worth noting is structural: BSD could only spread because recipients already held an AT&T Unix source license, and AT&T's antitrust agreement barred it from selling Unix as a product, so distribution ran on tapes and postage rather than a product business. Read it as background on why permissive redistribution and license terms shape adoption, not as guidance for current projects.
Discussion angle
The licensing constraint is the interesting bit: BSD's early spread depended on users already holding an AT&T Unix source license, and Berkeley charged only tape and postage. Ask the room which license or distribution constraint in their own stack today quietly limits who can adopt their work.