8 ms·

Bill Jolitz has died

199 points by cperciva 5y ago

caslon 5y ago
.
- caslon 5y ago
  It also mentions Jack Burness, the author of MOONLANDER. Here's an article that interviewed him last year: https://www.acriticalhit.com/moonlander-one-giant-leap-for-game-design/ https://www.acriticalhit.com/moonlander-one-giant-leap-for-g...
  - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    Thanks! I only played that vector game in the arcade. “ He says it took only ten days to program, “plus a day at MIT getting the real numbers and figuring it all out.” It was completed on February 25, 1973, coincidentally just four days before the release of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon.”
throw_m239339 5y ago
RIP.
ggm 5y ago
In many ways 386bsd in '92 was a flawed jewel. What it did is point the way, bust open a door. IIRC The first AT&T lawsuit was still going on, the SCO version of that farce was yet to arrive and we were living in a world where people with BSD copyright include files in AT&T licenced code were watching AT&T try to argue BSD were the bad guys. Bill and Lynn were holding on to an idea and put something out there which lit a fire under a community, used to Berkeley licenced code. Dr Dobbs helped. The work Keith Bostic started in the eighties unwinding att sourced code was huge too. It wasn't complete but it was enough. Sometimes, "enough" is what we need. I had access to BSD tapes, ran vaxes, sun's and the like, I'd done my time on pdp11s. Being able to move that experience beyond the IBM pc-rt (there was a licenced BSD port to the romp chip) onto the emerging commodity hardware pc was amazing. Maybe the real firelighter moment was the mmu enabled 386?
- musicale 5y ago
  I don't entirely understand why Linux took over and left BSD as an also-ran (except for Apple which uses BSD.) They're very similar in terms of core functionality and there was even Debian/kBSD that ran the Debian userland on a BSD kernel. Was it the specter of lawsuits (which ultimately had no effect?) Was it the "cathedral vs. the bazaar" (which didn't really cause that much of a divergence between *BSD and GNU/Linux distros in terms of core functionality?) Was it GPL vs. permissive licensing (which seems like it would favor BSD in terms of adoption?)
  - joshbaptiste 5y ago
    IIRC patent battles in court with AT&T and code removals from the source which kept 386BSD from getting off the ground quickly..
    - musicale 5y ago
      NetBSD and FreeBSD came out in 1993, the same year as Slackware. The BSDs seem like pretty complete Unix systems and are still in use today, but they are also-rans compared to GNU/Linux.
      - hapless 5y ago
        FreeBSD had to reboot the project after some lawsuits -- FreeBSD 2.0 is a different codebase from FreeBSD 1.1 It was a huge setback for every kind of adoption
        musicale 5y ago
        I didn't actually know that the FreeBSD project had to "reboot" - this is very interesting and adds to the "lawsuit" theory.
  - convolvatron 5y ago
    i think it was timing personally. i was an old sun guy and really didn’t like the solaris shift. there was about a onetk two year gap where 386bsd was kind of half baked but you could get a .9 slackware install running pretty easy. when freebsd released i switched back. not sure if that’s actually correct, but is the way i remember it
RachelF 5y ago
Anyone using a Mac with an Intel CPU is probably still running some of his code.
- tedunangst 5y ago
  The code you're probably thinking of actually has a mach lineage. https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu/blob/main/osfmk/x86_64/pmap.c https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu/blob/main/osfmk/x86_64/p...
jart 5y ago
What a sad unfortunate event and a great loss to humanity. I pin the blame on the "BSD is dying" trolls for meming his illness into reality. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26168596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26168596 Bill should have died a billionaire at age 120 after his fourth heart transplant from a linux user 1/5th his age.
throwaway81523 5y ago
RIP Bill. Less rememebered is that he founded Symmetric Computer Systems which made one of the first "personal" ($4000 instead of well into 5 figures). It used a National 32032 processor (competitor to 68000 and was better, but no one remembers it now) and ran 4.2bsd. Its tagline was "The Beauty and the BSD" and I just found an old ad for it. Sympathies to Lynne.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  32032 came out long after 68000. People who needed to code for 32032 learned to treat it like a RISC, because any instruction even slightly complicated generally didn't work.
- com 5y ago
  I loved writing NS32k assembly. Ugh I dealt with 8086 before that and it was such a pleasure to jump over to something designed for coder pleasure.
jacquesm 5y ago
Ah that sucks. 386BSD was as close to the real thing as it got for a while, running MGR on a cheap clone and boom, UNIX workstation. I used it for a while after Linux came alive, eventually switched, then moved to SGI/IRIX but 386BSD led the way there. Dr. Dobbs journal had a whole series of articles about it and a friend with University access got me a copy and then it was off to the races with an old set of the 'rainbow' manuals (not always applicable, but pretty useful). 64, that's way too young to go, and even though I never exchanged a word with Bill I owe him and Lynne so much. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/386BSD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/386BSD I wonder why the linked article spells it as "BSD 386" that's really strange especially given the confusion with BSD/386 and 386BSD.
rurban 5y ago
Bill and his wife Lynne created this fork, which was the most influental BSD. It's a joy to read what the Jolitz family accomplished: https://web.archive.org/web/20131123142712/http://lynnesblog.telemuse.net/ https://web.archive.org/web/20131123142712/http://lynnesblog... (Lynne's Blog)
russtrotter 5y ago
I was one of those people downloading 386BSD to floppy disks in my university computer lab in '91 or so. The prospect of running a "real" Unix on my PC hardware was really a way out of the prospect of saving up all my pennies for a SunOS workstation (north of 4kUSD at the time!). Linux (0.99?) was released around these times and took off way faster for all the reasons outlined by responses in this thread. It seems like Linux was inevitable with or without 386BSD and its descendants. Regardless, for me personally, I'll consider Jolitz's work seminal in my own thought and evolution when I was stuck in the mindset that only options were the big old klunky PDP 11/780's or the pricey SGI/Sun workstations that surrounded me in the same lab. He was part of that revolution of folks breaking those molds for that, thanks you Bill Jolitz.
panick21_ 5y ago
Trying to understand the late 80s and 90s Unix legal battles is a spiraling rapid-hole of confusion. I have been trying to figure out who got what code from where and was mixed with what code from when and who owned to whom and so on. But I always find more confusion. Recently I learned about this strange deal between Sun and Novell. Apparently Sun was able to Open Solaris later because of that deal with A&T. I was looking for a book called the Unix wars that explains all this stuff but its all bits and pieces.
jsrcout 5y ago
Highly recommend for anyone interested in the olden days to read the rest of the thread.
scruffyherder 5y ago
A literal Prometheus has just passed. No matter the disappearance of pushing rocks up hill, he did carry us a booting Net/2 to the lowly i386 PC crowd. We are lucky to have been blessed with his gift. RIP

199 points by cperciva 5y ago

caslon 5y ago

caslon 5y ago
It also mentions Jack Burness, the author of MOONLANDER. Here's an article that interviewed him last year: https://www.acriticalhit.com/moonlander-one-giant-leap-for-game-design/ https://www.acriticalhit.com/moonlander-one-giant-leap-for-g...
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  Thanks! I only played that vector game in the arcade. “ He says it took only ten days to program, “plus a day at MIT getting the real numbers and figuring it all out.” It was completed on February 25, 1973, coincidentally just four days before the release of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon.”

throw_m239339 5y ago

RIP.

ggm 5y ago

In many ways 386bsd in '92 was a flawed jewel. What it did is point the way, bust open a door. IIRC The first AT&T lawsuit was still going on, the SCO version of that farce was yet to arrive and we were living in a world where people with BSD copyright include files in AT&T licenced code were watching AT&T try to argue BSD were the bad guys. Bill and Lynn were holding on to an idea and put something out there which lit a fire under a community, used to Berkeley licenced code. Dr Dobbs helped. The work Keith Bostic started in the eighties unwinding att sourced code was huge too. It wasn't complete but it was enough. Sometimes, "enough" is what we need. I had access to BSD tapes, ran vaxes, sun's and the like, I'd done my time on pdp11s. Being able to move that experience beyond the IBM pc-rt (there was a licenced BSD port to the romp chip) onto the emerging commodity hardware pc was amazing. Maybe the real firelighter moment was the mmu enabled 386?

musicale 5y ago
I don't entirely understand why Linux took over and left BSD as an also-ran (except for Apple which uses BSD.) They're very similar in terms of core functionality and there was even Debian/kBSD that ran the Debian userland on a BSD kernel. Was it the specter of lawsuits (which ultimately had no effect?) Was it the "cathedral vs. the bazaar" (which didn't really cause that much of a divergence between *BSD and GNU/Linux distros in terms of core functionality?) Was it GPL vs. permissive licensing (which seems like it would favor BSD in terms of adoption?)
- joshbaptiste 5y ago
  IIRC patent battles in court with AT&T and code removals from the source which kept 386BSD from getting off the ground quickly..
  - musicale 5y ago
    NetBSD and FreeBSD came out in 1993, the same year as Slackware. The BSDs seem like pretty complete Unix systems and are still in use today, but they are also-rans compared to GNU/Linux.
    - hapless 5y ago
      FreeBSD had to reboot the project after some lawsuits -- FreeBSD 2.0 is a different codebase from FreeBSD 1.1 It was a huge setback for every kind of adoption
      - musicale 5y ago
        I didn't actually know that the FreeBSD project had to "reboot" - this is very interesting and adds to the "lawsuit" theory.
- convolvatron 5y ago
  i think it was timing personally. i was an old sun guy and really didn’t like the solaris shift. there was about a onetk two year gap where 386bsd was kind of half baked but you could get a .9 slackware install running pretty easy. when freebsd released i switched back. not sure if that’s actually correct, but is the way i remember it

RachelF 5y ago

Anyone using a Mac with an Intel CPU is probably still running some of his code.

tedunangst 5y ago
The code you're probably thinking of actually has a mach lineage. https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu/blob/main/osfmk/x86_64/pmap.c https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu/blob/main/osfmk/x86_64/p...

jart 5y ago

What a sad unfortunate event and a great loss to humanity. I pin the blame on the "BSD is dying" trolls for meming his illness into reality. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26168596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26168596 Bill should have died a billionaire at age 120 after his fourth heart transplant from a linux user 1/5th his age.

throwaway81523 5y ago

RIP Bill. Less rememebered is that he founded Symmetric Computer Systems which made one of the first "personal" ($4000 instead of well into 5 figures). It used a National 32032 processor (competitor to 68000 and was better, but no one remembers it now) and ran 4.2bsd. Its tagline was "The Beauty and the BSD" and I just found an old ad for it. Sympathies to Lynne.

ncmncm 5y ago
32032 came out long after 68000. People who needed to code for 32032 learned to treat it like a RISC, because any instruction even slightly complicated generally didn't work.
com 5y ago
I loved writing NS32k assembly. Ugh I dealt with 8086 before that and it was such a pleasure to jump over to something designed for coder pleasure.

jacquesm 5y ago

Ah that sucks. 386BSD was as close to the real thing as it got for a while, running MGR on a cheap clone and boom, UNIX workstation. I used it for a while after Linux came alive, eventually switched, then moved to SGI/IRIX but 386BSD led the way there. Dr. Dobbs journal had a whole series of articles about it and a friend with University access got me a copy and then it was off to the races with an old set of the 'rainbow' manuals (not always applicable, but pretty useful). 64, that's way too young to go, and even though I never exchanged a word with Bill I owe him and Lynne so much. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/386BSD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/386BSD I wonder why the linked article spells it as "BSD 386" that's really strange especially given the confusion with BSD/386 and 386BSD.

rurban 5y ago

Bill and his wife Lynne created this fork, which was the most influental BSD. It's a joy to read what the Jolitz family accomplished: https://web.archive.org/web/20131123142712/http://lynnesblog.telemuse.net/ https://web.archive.org/web/20131123142712/http://lynnesblog... (Lynne's Blog)

russtrotter 5y ago

I was one of those people downloading 386BSD to floppy disks in my university computer lab in '91 or so. The prospect of running a "real" Unix on my PC hardware was really a way out of the prospect of saving up all my pennies for a SunOS workstation (north of 4kUSD at the time!). Linux (0.99?) was released around these times and took off way faster for all the reasons outlined by responses in this thread. It seems like Linux was inevitable with or without 386BSD and its descendants. Regardless, for me personally, I'll consider Jolitz's work seminal in my own thought and evolution when I was stuck in the mindset that only options were the big old klunky PDP 11/780's or the pricey SGI/Sun workstations that surrounded me in the same lab. He was part of that revolution of folks breaking those molds for that, thanks you Bill Jolitz.

panick21_ 5y ago

Trying to understand the late 80s and 90s Unix legal battles is a spiraling rapid-hole of confusion. I have been trying to figure out who got what code from where and was mixed with what code from when and who owned to whom and so on. But I always find more confusion. Recently I learned about this strange deal between Sun and Novell. Apparently Sun was able to Open Solaris later because of that deal with A&T. I was looking for a book called the Unix wars that explains all this stuff but its all bits and pieces.

jsrcout 5y ago

Highly recommend for anyone interested in the olden days to read the rest of the thread.

scruffyherder 5y ago

A literal Prometheus has just passed. No matter the disappearance of pushing rocks up hill, he did carry us a booting Net/2 to the lowly i386 PC crowd. We are lucky to have been blessed with his gift. RIP