BSD History Y2K

By Xah Lee. Date: .
FreeBSD mascot
BSD's mascot BSD Daemon, named Beastie. (some or all drawn by John Lasseter.)
FreeBSD mascot Beastie phk hnKBK
FreeBSD mascot Beastie, drawn by Poul-Henning Kamp
bsd poke dos
Beastie poking DOS
bsd poke att
Beastie poking AT&T

The BSD mascot is inspired by a wonderful cartoon drawing by Phil Foglio.

The BSD unixes's mascot is a tykish red daemon, with a trident and a 1980s Converse All-Stars basketball sneaker. BSD stands for Berkeley Software Distribution, developed by studs from the hippy intelligentsia University of California, Berkeley. The second and third images are BSD shirts printed before 1990s. Notice the DOS balloon and the AT&T deathstar. From these, we know that once BSD were in competition with MS-DOS (MicroSoft Disk Operating System) and the trademarked Unix then owned by AT&T. These images are from the BSD daemon history page http://www.mckusick.com/beastie/index.html (link defunct as of 2007-09) .

BSD Beastie reading doc
BSD daemon devouring docs
BSD figurine and cat
BSD figurine and cat
BSD figurines
Beastie figurine. Notice the Apache feather. These are sold by http://bsdsouvenirs.com/ 
               ,        ,
              /(        )`
              \ \___   / |
              /- _  `-/  '
             (/\/ \ \   /\
             / /   | `    \
             O O   ) /    |
             `-^--'`<     '
            (_.)  _  )   /
             `.___/`    /
               `-----' /
  <----.     __ / __   \
  <----|====O)))==) \) /====
  <----'    `--' `.__,' \
               |        |
           FL   \       /
           ______( (_  / \______
         ,'  ,-----'   |        \
         `--{__________)        \/

Art author's site: http://www.aracnet.com/~flee/ascii-art.html

bsd girl dscf0028
The most alluring daemon babe! LinuxWorld 2000 convention New York

〔see UNIX Philosophy, Fast Food the UNIX way〕

I have not admined BSDs. Reportedly, BSD is technically superior to Linuxes. Like most Open Source projects, there are 3 major factions of BSD:

FreeBSD is the most popular, and focus on common PC hardwares, i.e. Intel. NetBSD focuses on portability on all types of hardwares. OpenBSD is famous for its extra concern on “security”. (the entire “security” problems in today's computing industry is a egregious insult to how things should be. Security problems are in fact created and fermented by the unix community. If unix did not exist, the computing world would harbor a lot less of hackers.)

FreeBSD docs page is at: http://www.freebsd.org/docs.html

freebsd doc site 2020-01-13 w8s2w
freebsd doc site, screenshot 2020-01-13 http://www.freebsd.org/docs.html

The Unix Pestilence