BSD on Windows: things I wish I knew existed

Posted on 2023-12-10 by pappp

Source: OSNews

Article note: That is a supremely weird artifact. It was a set of libraries that ran on Windows 3.1 (or later 95) and used winmem32.dll to touch real memory, which provided (most of) the interfaces to run 386 a.out BSD binaries and a unix userland. From right in the 386BSD/BSDi Lawsuit 4.3BSD era, sort of before Linux and after Coherent or Xenix as low-cost x86 unix options.

It’s 1995 and I’ve been nearly two years in the professional workspace. OS/2 is the dominant workstation product, Netware servers rule the world, and the year of the Linux desktop is going to happen any moment now. If you weren’t running OS/2, you were probably running Windows 3.1, only very few people were using that Linux thing. What would have been the prefect OS at the time would have been NT with a competent POSIX subsystem, but since we were denied that, enter Hiroshi Oota with BSD on Windows.

↫ neozeed at Virtually Fun

This is absolutely wild.

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