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NetBSD was my favourite playing around OS from the late 1990s to about 2010. Worked on any old crap I had lying around which was mostly thoroughly obsolete SPAR

NetBSD was my favourite playing around OS from the late 1990s to about 2010. Worked on any old crap I had lying around which was mostly thoroughly obsolete SPARC and x86 kit. Did the job. Never went wrong. Good documentation built in. Netbooted on anything. No idea where it is now but this post has inspired me to have a look.

jambalaya8 1mo ago
I was a fan of FreeBSD over NetBSD; far more driver compatibility in the 1990s. It was nice to play with. Way too hard to use for much (well, online) now, due to the shrinking number of software packages (eg browsers) these days. I still remember how good it used to feel installing NetBSD on (now long long dead) laptop in the early/mid-90s.
- cavem0nkey 1mo ago
  I would have gone for FreeBSD myself but alas it didn’t run on the SPARC stuff I lifted out of the company skip :) I think the thing with the BSDs in general was the fact I didn’t always even need any extra software packages on them. The base install was that useful.
  - jambalaya8 1mo ago
    Yeah, NetBSD definitely had Sparc compatibility. I wonder how many OpenSolaris and NetBSD machines on old Sparc hardware are still on the internet (like ones that aren't doing it just to say they are). The base install _was_ useful. Can still do stuff like write, and those sorts of old packages still work, but browsers.... not so much.
  - hylaride 1mo ago
    The BSDs were so clean. With the exception of Slackware, Linux distros at the time (late 90s/early 2000s) tended to be bloated with everything installed and enabled by default for "ease of use" reasons. I was an OpenBSD guy, and the way they made loading things so cleanly and straightforward in /etc/rc.conf was a delight.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 1mo ago
      > With the exception of Slackware, Linux distros at the time (late 90s/early 2000s) tended to be bloated with everything installed and enabled by default for "ease of use" reasons. Not true. There were many lesser known Distros like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Mage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Mage , or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T2_SDE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T2_SDE which survived to this day. I'd say the latter is running on more diverse hardware platforms than NetBSD, and actively developed and maintained :-) Portable means just that: "Potentially portable if someone makes the effort." Which NetBSD didn't in comparison. And even if, it's lacking drivers for being fully featured.
      - jambalaya8 1mo ago
        I mean there was always Minix! Minix was available on floppies long before most people started running linux. Because it existed several years before linux. There was also SCO Unix.
        LargoLasskhyfv 1mo ago
        But you couldn't do shit with it, on most hardware. And it wasn't really free. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system) would have been more practical.
        jambalaya8 1mo ago
        I mean, why not BeOS, GNU Hurd, or ... etc. There wasn't much software for any of those things (and you would have had to be a pretty exotic sort of software pirate or know some hobbyists or be in an academic setting to afford them if you could not). That said I don't really support open source OSes for stuff like the stock market, and did not in the 1990s before they all shifted from AIX, Solaris, HP-UX and non-UNIX-based OSes to Linux in the late 90s/just before 9/11. Throwing this out there because we talked about how things can go wrong. If you had any of the less common things like your mention or mine though, it was pretty good for job hunting. FWIW, never heard of your suggestion (more surprised I hadn't). But a lot of things were word of mouth back then, if not Computerworld, or something like it. I personally liked QNX a sh-t ton.
- LargoLasskhyfv 1mo ago
  I percieved FBSD as slower at the times, more bloated so to speak ;-> OTOH it gave a very usable console at 132x60 on a 21" CRT, which NetBSD didn't at the time, at least not on X86. Its ports tree was also more comprehensive. Imagine Lynx, (E)Links(2), W3M on that. Which were perfectly usable then!1!! What else? Lemme think... the slow rebuild to MP from 4.4 to 5 made me abandon it. By that time I've mastered NetBSD and gave a shit about the 132x60 textmode, because X with FVWM gave me so much more virtual desktop. It also used the 1.5GB Virtual Channel Memory SDRAM without having to do anything special, like under Linux, or FBSD, which somehow ran unstable with it.

jambalaya8 1mo ago

I was a fan of FreeBSD over NetBSD; far more driver compatibility in the 1990s. It was nice to play with. Way too hard to use for much (well, online) now, due to the shrinking number of software packages (eg browsers) these days. I still remember how good it used to feel installing NetBSD on (now long long dead) laptop in the early/mid-90s.

cavem0nkey 1mo ago
I would have gone for FreeBSD myself but alas it didn’t run on the SPARC stuff I lifted out of the company skip :) I think the thing with the BSDs in general was the fact I didn’t always even need any extra software packages on them. The base install was that useful.
- jambalaya8 1mo ago
  Yeah, NetBSD definitely had Sparc compatibility. I wonder how many OpenSolaris and NetBSD machines on old Sparc hardware are still on the internet (like ones that aren't doing it just to say they are). The base install _was_ useful. Can still do stuff like write, and those sorts of old packages still work, but browsers.... not so much.
- hylaride 1mo ago
  The BSDs were so clean. With the exception of Slackware, Linux distros at the time (late 90s/early 2000s) tended to be bloated with everything installed and enabled by default for "ease of use" reasons. I was an OpenBSD guy, and the way they made loading things so cleanly and straightforward in /etc/rc.conf was a delight.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 1mo ago
    > With the exception of Slackware, Linux distros at the time (late 90s/early 2000s) tended to be bloated with everything installed and enabled by default for "ease of use" reasons. Not true. There were many lesser known Distros like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Mage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Mage , or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T2_SDE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T2_SDE which survived to this day. I'd say the latter is running on more diverse hardware platforms than NetBSD, and actively developed and maintained :-) Portable means just that: "Potentially portable if someone makes the effort." Which NetBSD didn't in comparison. And even if, it's lacking drivers for being fully featured.
    - jambalaya8 1mo ago
      I mean there was always Minix! Minix was available on floppies long before most people started running linux. Because it existed several years before linux. There was also SCO Unix.
      - LargoLasskhyfv 1mo ago
        But you couldn't do shit with it, on most hardware. And it wasn't really free. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system) would have been more practical.
        jambalaya8 1mo ago
        I mean, why not BeOS, GNU Hurd, or ... etc. There wasn't much software for any of those things (and you would have had to be a pretty exotic sort of software pirate or know some hobbyists or be in an academic setting to afford them if you could not). That said I don't really support open source OSes for stuff like the stock market, and did not in the 1990s before they all shifted from AIX, Solaris, HP-UX and non-UNIX-based OSes to Linux in the late 90s/just before 9/11. Throwing this out there because we talked about how things can go wrong. If you had any of the less common things like your mention or mine though, it was pretty good for job hunting. FWIW, never heard of your suggestion (more surprised I hadn't). But a lot of things were word of mouth back then, if not Computerworld, or something like it. I personally liked QNX a sh-t ton.
LargoLasskhyfv 1mo ago
I percieved FBSD as slower at the times, more bloated so to speak ;-> OTOH it gave a very usable console at 132x60 on a 21" CRT, which NetBSD didn't at the time, at least not on X86. Its ports tree was also more comprehensive. Imagine Lynx, (E)Links(2), W3M on that. Which were perfectly usable then!1!! What else? Lemme think... the slow rebuild to MP from 4.4 to 5 made me abandon it. By that time I've mastered NetBSD and gave a shit about the 132x60 textmode, because X with FVWM gave me so much more virtual desktop. It also used the 1.5GB Virtual Channel Memory SDRAM without having to do anything special, like under Linux, or FBSD, which somehow ran unstable with it.