4.3BSD is still being maintained

Michael Sokolov undertook an interesting project, and that is continuing maintaining the 4.3BSD system for the VAX architecture. 4.3BSD is considered "the last true BSD" by a number of old-school BSD hackers and users. Michael is one of them, and he called his release series Quasijarus, which is directly based on 4.3BSD-Tahoe.



You can download 4.3BSD-Quasijarus0c (the latest Quasijarus release) from ftp://ifctfvax.harhan.org/pub/UNIX/4.3BSD-Quasijarus0c/. It runs perfectly not only on real VAXen (unfortunately, it doesn't on VAXstations), but also in VAX simulators like SIMH. If you don't want to go through the hassle of bootstrapping 4.3BSD-Quasijarus0c by yourself, you can use Markus Weber's ready-to-use disk images plus according SIMH configuration.



For my taste, 4.3BSD is already too bloated. I personally prefer Ultrix 3.1 (for PDP/11), which is just the perfect combination of "keep it small and simple" and the comfort of BSD (e.g. a real screen editor). The 2.x BSDs are quite nice, too. If you also want to dig a bit into Unix retrocomputing, I can recommend The Unix Heritage Society, which provides a number of distribution kits and ready-to-use disk images of a variety of Unix versions, ranging from Unix V3 kernel source code and documentation to the last BSD releases done by UCB's Computer Science Research Group.