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

  today at 9:25 PM

  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

    today at 9:32 PM

    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

      today at 10:29 PM

      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.

Awesome!

Two things:

1) “We were” (sorry I had to do it).

2) Why NetBSD? Why not FreeBSD or Debian or heck even Ubuntu Server or RHEL/CentOS (forgot it was 2005)?

Glad you got the spend more time with the family!

• jambalaya8

  today at 10:31 PM

  Or gentoo. Gentoo was pretty good around then, great to hack around with.

• clort

  today at 8:36 PM

  As to why, Gary didn't say.. or even contribute again, so we could surmise it was a made-up name to make sure the company he worked for wasn't identified, but some of the replies to his mail went into more detail about why they did, you can find them here

  https://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-advocacy/2005/09/

• Brian_K_White

  today at 10:23 PM

  freebsd = utility: performance, gnu software compatibility, drivers, closest thing to useful as a desktop (still not very), but almost x86 only

  openbsd = security: internet exposed services

  netbsd = portability: already ported / most easily portable to every cpu arch & platform including old and new obscure ones. If you want a big-endian os for whatever academic reason, it's netbsd on an old sun sparc or pi3. I had an HP Jornada that had a SH3 cpu and shipped with wince, the only alternative os on that was netbsd.

I'm considering initiating a campaign to influence a community space that I'm a part of into running NetBSD on some low-risk infrastructure that we may adopt.

• Grimeton

  today at 10:19 PM

  You could just throw a squirrel carcass in a cardboard box and install netbsd on it

• whalesalad

  today at 8:30 PM

  I have been wanting to do this for a while. I have used FreeBSD and OpenBSD in server or embedded environments, but never as a desktop. And I have zero experience with NetBSD or DragonflyBSD but want to play with those too.

  • tolerance

    today at 9:08 PM

    I enjoyed the time I spent browsing the web and reading ebooks while running OpenBSD on a Thinkpad. The same goes for hosting a web page on a VPS I used to rent. I found that what people say about it is true: the documentation is great. To the extent that I needed to tinker I gained a fair amount of coherence about how things worked. This is sort of what I want the guys in my community to experience for themselves.

A fairytale is a beautiful thing.

> This also lead to more arguments with the wife (which leads to a decrease in other things... ;)

I love the subtlety of the dual-use closing-parenthesis here.

NetBSD is the only Unix that IMO still fun to hack on.. no AI, just hack..

> NetBSD during peak hours, our httpd servers can deal with 35 requests per minute(internal and external).

even in 2005 this is abysmal. no reflection of netbsd tho - likely a terrible app.

• kev009

  today at 9:10 PM

  The way it's written is ambiguous as it could also just mean the peak demand rate, not a capacity peak. I was doing some benchmarks for something recently and noticed how tricky it is to capture all the nuance of a test in prose.

• alexpotato

  today at 9:08 PM

  > 12MB email attachments

  It was a different time.

Cool stuff