Given Linus Torvalds‘ recent quote that the OpenBSD team’s approach to security made them look like a gang of masturbating monkeys, I thought it might be a good time to start up an idea I’ve been considering for a while: operating system of the week.

BSD, in case you don’t already know, was developed at the University of California, Berkeley from 1977 until the mid-90s. It started on the classic DEC PDP-11 as an add on to Sixth Edition Unix, and in its second release added my favourite text editor, good old vi (well, vim‘s actually the one I use, but that’s a side issue.)

In June 1994 came the first truly “open” version of BSD: 4.4 BSD-Lite, which contained no code from AT&T, and therefore wasn’t “encumbered” (which was the name of the version that did include AT&T code). A final release – 4.4BSDLite-2 – was made in 1995, and since then, development has continued with various distributions diverging from it since then: DragonflyBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD being the most common today (I’ll cover them at a later date).

You can still get hold of 4.4BSD-Lite release 2, however, despite its long being discontinued as a maintained system (well, by the University of California, anyway). So, for your delectation and delight, here is the download link (to Japan):

• ftp://ftp.sra.co.jp/pub/os/4.4BSD-Lite/

I’ve downloaded it myself, and might well be covering running it in a virtual machine at some later date.

For the mean time, enjoy this little look back at the way things used to be.

Suddenly the world seems to have changed, one way or the other.

First, Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated by a suicide bomber: a disaster for Pakistani politics (if not world politics), as far as I can tell.

Then, there’s the fact that digital storage is much more costly and problematic than traditional film storage.  Or the fact that Alexander Graham Bell didn’t invent the telephone.  Or that the Sistine Chapel is now copyrighted by the Vatican (public domain?  We’ve heard of it…).

Although perhaps the most technologically significant story of the day is the latest chapter of the SCO v its customers saga: they’ve been delisted from Nasdaq.  Seems a fitting punishment for what appears to be their corporate misbehaviour to me…

Did you know that you can get Fujitsu Cobol version 3 for absolutely nothing?  (The latest versions are paid for, and the new one even targets .Net.)

COBOL was in demand for year 2000 compliance work; so much so there were rumours of recruitment agencies searching retirement homes, looking for retired COBOL programmers…

Anyway, if you’ve ever fancied trying the language considered the most verbose of all time (apparently there’s a disease called “COBOL fingers“, where you wear them down to stumps by typing long complicated mathematical statements in the form “ADD 1 TO SALES GIVING SALES” instead of, say “sales++”, or even “sales = sales + 1″) .

COBOL stands for “COmmon Business Oriented Language”, and the syntax was meant to be understandable by normal humans (that is, not programmers).  However I suspect that it was also a reaction to the terseness of operating systems such as Multics, GEORGE III and Unix, all of which go in for shortened commands such as “ls”, “rm” and “chmod”.

Since then we’ve seen the advance of GUIs, much better development tools (ever tried writing a makefile by hand?) and a plethora of different programming languages.

Still, if you don’t fancy COBOL, how about Intercal?  <evil grin>