BSD Operating System Analysis

BSD is one of two major branches of the Unix operating system. BSD, which stands for “Berkeley Standard Distribution”, was first developed in a partnership between University of California, Berkeley and Bell Laboratories during the late 1970s (Bretthauer, 2002, 5). The BSD operating system was the first operating system to be distributed with its source code, first through a high-priced code license from AT&T (Bretthauer, 2002, 5). The development of TCP/IP and its integration into BSD led to a push to redesign BSD to be a freely distributed operating system in the early 1980s (Bretthauer, 2002, 6).

The developers of BSD, realizing that they could not release AT&T code without illegally bypassing their licensing, requested help from developers in reverse-engineering the original BSD code in order to release it for general use (Bretthauer, 2002, 6). This move was instrumental in the eventual adoption of TCP/IP as a networking standard. By the 1990s, through a series of code forks, disagreements among developers and deliberate extension of the operating system to run on multiple platforms, there were a large number of branches of BSD available in the free software market.

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These variants included NetBSD, a developmental and research branch; FreeBSD, which focused on development for the x86 platform for use in personal computers; and openBSD, a branch of NetBSD which focuses on stable releases and the integration of cryptography (Bretthauer, 2002, 7). Modern commercial descendants of BSD include Mac OS X and Solaris, Sun’s operating system. There are also so-called “hybrid” proprietary systems such as HP-UX, which integrate features from both BSD and System V Unix in order to take advantage of the strengths of both operating systems.

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Quartermann (1985, 384) explains the design principles behind the BSD operating system. The original design was centered on flexibility and simplicity. Support for multiple processes, standard connections between processes and simplicity of data file types are hallmarks of Unix systems which BSD inherited. Devices are treated as files for the purposes of application access, with the specifics of device handling hidden in the kernel device drivers.

Updated: May 19, 2021
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BSD Operating System Analysis. (2020, Jun 01). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/bsd-operating-system-analysis-new-essay

BSD Operating System Analysis essay
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