Nick's FreeBSD page

I've been a user of FreeBSD since the very beginning - before it was actually called FreeBSD. I hooked up with it when it was still 386/BSD. At that time, Bill Jolitz released something that... sort of worked. A bunch of folks started gathering patches for it until at some point the size and complexity of the patchkit morphed into a fork that became FreeBSD 0.x and 1.x. Later, with the resolution of the Berkeley vs. AT&T lawsuit, FreeBSD was forced to upgrade to the newly unencumbered 4.4 Lite release from Berkeley. That became FreeBSD 2.0, and it's been motoring on on that codebase ever since.

I used to run the world's smallest ISP. It was a Sun, and then a pair of FreeBSD machines, with an Internet connection that was better than I would otherwise be able to afford. When broadband became more ubiquitous and inexpensive, I let the ISP business go and eventually gave up on having a static IP address at home, opting instead on a VM hosted at RootBSD. It's running 10.1 at the moment (in late 2014) on ZFS.

At home, I'm mostly a mac guy, but FreeBSD is making a bit of a personal comeback for me, in the form of the ARM version running on Raspberry Pi.