The History of FreeBSD

FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for x86 compatible amd64 compatible ARM, IA-64, PC-98 and UltraSPARC architectures. BSD stands for Berkeley Software Distribution. The original BSD was first released in 1977, quickly followed by the release of 2BSD in 1978. 3BSD, the first VAX distribution from Berkeley comprised of virtual memory, ported utilities and Pascal. 4BSD was released in 1980 and included job control, auto reboot and a 1K block filesystem.

In 1993, the FreeBSD Project was formed by Rodney Grimes, Nate Williams and Jordan Hubbard. Their initial goal was to produce an intermediate snapshot of 386BSD that took care of a number of problems that the patchkit for it was unable to. 386BSD was an operating system belonging to Bill Jollitz, and had many problems. Rodney, Nate and Jordan were the coordinators of this patchkit. When Bill Jollitz withdrew support for the project, they decided to go ahead with this interim “cleanup” snapshot. They adopted the name “FreeBSD”, coined by David Greenman. FreeBSD was directed at the x83 platform. FreeBSD 1.0 released in December, 1993. This version was based on the 4.3BSD-Lite (“Net/2”) tape from U.C. Berkeley, and included many components provided by 386BSD and the Free Software Foundation. One party instrumental in the distribution of FreeBSD was Walnut Creek CDROM, who supported the idea of distributing FreeBSD on CD for those individuals who did not have internet access. FreeBSD soon ran into rough weather, when Unix System Laboratories (USL) sued BSDI and Berkeley for loss of trade secrets and use of the term UNIX. The two warring parties reached a compromise in 1994, wherein three files from Net/2 were removed. As a result of this agreement, FreeBSD had to be re-engineered. Soon, 4.4 BSD-Lite was released which complied with the agreement’s terms. In November 1994, FreeBSD 2.0 was released, followed by many other releases through the years.

FreeBSD 2.1.5 was released in August of 1996 and became an immediate hit with the ISP and commercial communities. FreeBSD 2.1.7.1 was released in February 1997, which marked the end of mainstream development on 2.1-STABLE, which is now in maintenance mode with only security enhancements and other critical bug fixes being done.

In November 1996, FreeBSD 2.2 was branched from the development mainline (“-CURRENT”) as the RELENG_2_2 branch, and in April 1997, 2.2.1 was released. Through 1997 further releases were made, with the last one being 2.2.8 in November 1998. In October 1998, the 3.0 version was officially released marking the end for the 2.2 branch.

In Jan 1999, the tree branched with the 4.0-CURRENT and 3.X-STABLE branches. The 3.X-STABLE, released 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4 in 1999, and 3.5 in 2000, which was closely followed by a minor release 3.5.1 incorporating some security fixes. This was the last release from 3.X

In March 2000, the 4.X STABLE branch was released. After several releases, the last 4.11-RELEASE came out in January 2005.

In January 2003, the 5.0-RELEASE was announced. This release introduced support for UltraSPARC and ia64 platforms and was followed by 5.1 in June of 2003. In February 2004, the last 5.X release, 5.2.1-RELEASE, was introduced.

The RELENG_5 branch was created in August 2004, with its most recent and last release, 5.5-RELEASE, in May 2006.

In 2005, RELENG_6. 6.0-RELEASE, the first release of the 6.X branch, was released. The latest 6.2-RELEASE came out in Jan 2007.