The Unix system family tree: Research and BSD

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/~checkout~/src/share/misc/bsd-family-tree?rev=HEAD

by jorgecastillo • 13 years ago

81 40 13 years ago

freebsd.org

aurora72• 13 years ago

It's nice to see Mac OS X stem from Unix

weland2• 13 years ago

IIRC it is actually a certified Unix.

pdw• 13 years ago

http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/bpl/ Your options for certified UNIX seem to be Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, OS X and Inspur K-UX. WTF is Inspur K-UX?

Someone2• 13 years ago

'Being a certified Unix' and 'Stemming from Unix' are orthogonal properties; neither implies the other.

whr• 13 years ago

Shouldn't iOS be present in this tree too, as derivative of MacOS?

terabytest• 13 years ago

The kernel is probably exactly the same.

masklinn• 13 years ago

Nice timeline. NeXTSTEP's missing, but Rhapsody made the cut, which is nice.

networked3• 13 years ago

This reminds me of a neat NetBSD 1.3 story that was posted here on HN not so long ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6503464.

I wonder which of the now-legacy *BSD and OS X releases has the largest surviving install base. Could it be FreeBSD 4.x? OS X 10.5 on PowerPC Macs?

Edit: 4.x, not 5.x.

cjg_• 13 years ago

More likely FreeBSD 4.* than 5.

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networked3• 13 years ago

Yeah, I meant 4.x rather than 5.x. Edited.

My first ISP (which also was the first one in our town) used FreeBSD and I'm pretty sure it was FreeBSD 4 at the time. I knew this because they allowed their dial-up users shell access and, in fact, their official instructions on how to change your dial-up password involved using HyperTerminal in Windows. I still wonder if giving out shells was generosity or carelessness on their part [1] but about a year later they changed it so that everyone who dialed in just got passwd(1) as their shell.

[1] Although since I never really did anything untoward with mine and didn't know of anyone who did maybe they'd actually calculated the risk correctly.

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efournie• 13 years ago

There is also a nice Unix family tree there: http://www.levenez.com/unix/

As it includes Linux, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, HURD, OS X and their derivatives, the graph is huge but very interesting!

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pavanky2• 13 years ago

Isn't solaris part of the tree as well ?

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AdamN2• 13 years ago

Solaris broke off from BSD and is based on System V Release 4 ... which is partly based on BSD. It depends on how far back you want to prune the tree. They just wanted to stick with the pure BSDs that didn't take come from other projects I guess

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(operating_system)#His...

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pavanky2• 13 years ago

Hmm. In that case I wonder how pure of a BSD OSX is.

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Someone2• 13 years ago

AFAIK, Solaris doesn't share any code with the 'UNIX' this talks about, or at least historically didn't (dtrace and ZFS got ported to at least some BSDs; some other code may have moved later). At the very least, adding Solaris would make this a forest, not a tree.

EDIT: just read sibling comment. From there, read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_%28operating_system%29 for verification. Solaris was based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_V_Release_4#SVR4. You never are too old to learn.

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gpvos• 13 years ago

Solaris was mostly based on SysV, but SunOS, Solaris' predecessor, was based on BSD, and should be included, I think.

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AdamN2• 13 years ago

Not yet updated with OS X 10.9

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acc00• 13 years ago

This list appears to be missing Plan 9, which is a direct continuation of Research Unix line (a successor to 10th Edition)

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p9idf• 13 years ago

The graph at http://www.unix-diagram.org/ has it as well as many others not listed in the article.

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solarexplorer• 13 years ago

Plan 9 is not a Unix. At best it's some kind of spiritual successor to Unix, like Infero.

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dragonwriter2• 13 years ago

Inferno has roughly the same relationship to Plan 9 as Plan 9 has to Unix, as I understand it.

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octotoad• 13 years ago

Never realized the 2BSD series was being developed in parallel with 4BSD.

I love to geek out on Unix history when I'm bored, so I'm surprised I never picked up on this.

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yeukhon• 13 years ago

That ascii art - script or hand-crafted?

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arh68• 13 years ago

The diffs make me think it's hand-crafted.

http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/share/misc/bsd-family-tr...

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fs111• 13 years ago

I always liked this massive PDF version: http://www.levenez.com/unix/

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asdasf• 13 years ago

I just realized one of the reasons I like OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD, but not FreeBSD and NetBSD from that graph. Those nice straight lines with no branching.

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contingencies• 13 years ago

I'd like to see the same but with a visual diff of syscall syntax you can access by clicking on any edge.

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poobrains• 13 years ago

Fitting (or maybe embarrassing) that it's in ASCII art.

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The Unix system family tree: Research and BSD

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