Berkeley Software Distribution
lastmod 2025-02-24created 2016-05-022 edits
BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) is a Unix operating system developed by the CSRG (Computer Systems Research Group) at the University of California, Berkeley from 1977 to 1995. Today the term BSD is used broadly to refer to the BSD descendants that branched off from the family of Unix-like operating systems. Operating systems derived from the original BSD code are still actively developed and widely used today.
Historically, BSD has been considered a branch of Unix called Berkeley Unix, because it shares the initial code base and design of the original AT&T Unix operating system. In the 1980s, BSD was widely adopted by workstation vendors in the form of proprietary Unix variants such as DEC ULTRIX and Sun Microsystems SunOS. This was due to its ease of licensing and the familiarity it held among the founders of many technology companies.
Although these proprietary BSD derivatives were largely superseded in the 1990s by UNIX System V Release 4 and OSF/1 systems (both of which incorporated BSD code and were the basis of other modern Unix systems), later BSD releases provided the basis for several ongoing open-source development projects such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and PC-BSD. In other words, it has been incorporated in part or in whole into modern proprietary operating systems, such as the TCP/IP networking code of Windows NT 3.1 and much of the foundation of Apple's OS X and iOS.
Categories
- OpenBSD
- NetBSD