Kirk McKusick - A Narrative History of BSD
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as the authoritative, first-hand telling of BSD lore whenever Unix and BSD history comes up.
What it is
Kirk McKusick gives a narrative history of the Berkeley Software Distributions at MeetBSD California. He covers how BSD originated and evolved, including the origin of the networking releases.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2020 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends nix23 · 2020-06 · on “Linux Sucks 2020 [video]”
Yep, that! Maybe you have some fun with BSD-Lore (Kirk McKusick): [this video] Or Solaris/illumos (Bryan M. Cantrill): [LINK]
Cites pjmlp · 2020-11 · on “The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan”
"Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, The, 2nd Edition" [LINK] Marshall Kirk McKusick has done some talks on the subject. [this video] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]
Cites damhsa · 2025-04 · on “Dipping my toes in OpenBSD, in Amsterdam”
i didnt understand it until i stumbled on the bsd supp docs that openbsd couldnt be ****** to include. i dont have the sources, but v7 vol2 is close enough: [LINK] vol2 contains fuller book like manuals and tutorials for complicated things like ed, C, filesystem, UNIX, etc. and should be your first introduction to UNIX/BSD, while the man(1) program (vol1) serves as a complementary quick reference for experienced users and for short programs that dont need much explanation. sadly V7 wont tell you about the internet because that was started by the "net" releases of 4.3-4.4BSD (see kirk mckusicks history [this video] ) for vi, get the PostScript.ps files for the OTHER manual from keith bostics sourc