A Narrative History of BSD, Dr. Kirk McKusick

Why HN readers recommended it

Recommended as an engaging, non-technical history of Unix and BSD from someone who was there, and cited for specific stories like the TCP/IP stack.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

bsdconferences

Topic

BSD history

Format

talk

Level

general

HN recommenders in dataset

3

HN mentions in dataset

4

Recommendation years in dataset

2013–2017

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• EDIT: Watch this video for details! [VIDEO] Key quotes around 8:30 - 9:00, but the whole thing is excellent. DARPA was funding all sorts of different networking and operating systems, which in those days were all incompatible. But they wanted them to cooperate, hence open …

• BSDs, game design and computer history: — [LINK] collects talks from various BSD conferences. An interesting non-technical talk from the collection is "A Narrative History of BSD" by Marshall Kirk McKusick ( [VIDEO] ). — [LINK] — lectures on game design and development by Chris …

• If you have some time to refresh memory. "A Narrative History of BSD by Dr. Kirk McKusick" [VIDEO] "Unix came into many CS departments largely because it was the only powerful interactive system that could run on the sort of hardware (PDP-11s) that universities could …