BSD and DARPA

• at the U of Berkeley students improved AT&T's UNIX codebase

• whoever ran the code had to purchase a $260.000 license from AT&T

• US mulitary wanted to consolidate the computer projects they funded to use only one platform/OS

• BSD Unix won over VMS

• DARPA funded development of BSD (multi million dollar)

• also funded a separate entity to implement the new network stack TCP

• the people at Berkeley did TCP anyway (for free), because they thought they can do better, which turned out to be true

• released the network code to the public under the newly created BSD license (pay $1000 to get a tape and a piece of paper or just download for free)

• Bill Joy was leading the team

• he also invented vi

• later released a full BSD-licensed system to the public

• "write a utility and get your name in the light"

• were sued by AT&T and settled (well, won)

• Joy left and help founding Sun Microsystems at Stanford

• video: A Narrative History of BSD, Dr. Kirk McKusick

• FreeBSD, Darwin, Mac OSX, IOS(?) are all derived from BSD

• the TCP code developed at Berkeley is in even more devices and OSes (including MS products)