More on BSD and UC

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at tsoft.com
Tue Mar 14 12:33:29 PST 2000


How does the 1991 Gov-Regent gutting refer to BSD?

Michael Perelman ---------

Hey Mike,

This is a rather long post because the relation is complicated.

I don't know many of the details, but in the early nineties, as you recall, gov Wilson and the UC Regents put together a university wide budget cut-back that had a profound impact on the everything at UC. Many tenture track, older profs were offered golden parachute retirement packages to get off the payroll, whole departments were eliminated and many courses were dropped as regular catalogue offerings. The humanities and arts (Art Dept cut from 22 to 3 positions) were hit the hardest, but the sciences were also hit. Bio-physics and other departments were erased or merged. Biology, Zoology, Botany were mashed together and cut up into a slew of new entities with lots of early retirements and outright cuts.

In the middle of all this both the faculty and student run projects in computer science were also effected. BSD was a university based project and part of a loosely defined liaison between some large corporate interests like AT&T, Bell Labs, the Defense Dept through LBL and the university proper. Several of the faculty involved in BSD formed their own quasi-corporate entity called BSDi, for Berkeley Software Development Inc. Two of these guys are still around and are behind the merger with FreeBSD and their for-profit distributors Walnut Creek CDROM.

Anyway the way I learned about all this is that my son (a chem major at the time) was friends with several comp sci kids involved in what was then called OCF, or open computer facility. This was a student run and ASUC funded project that provided on-line, dial up computer accounts and computing services to the students at UC. Naturally I had my own bogus student account thanks to my kid. This service ran Unix on a whole room full of half broken down DEC's and other ancient machines from the late Seventies and early Eighties.

Well, when the budget cutting arrived, the University decided to privatize, subcontract, and re-vamp the administration of its campus computer systems. This newer entity is called IST, for Information Systems and Technology. What is public and what is privately held is quite mysterious to me. I know they subcontract their internet tunk lines, dial up services, modem banks and other related pieces of the system. In any event, this IST wanted the physical space that the old student run OCF had, and got it, naturally. So OCF moved and re-organized and basically lost its student autonomy to the administration since it was then supervised by IST. Naturally, I was pissed because that was the end of my free, illegal, student account. But hey as an alumni and ex-employee in bad standing, I figured I deserved a free ride, for old time sake.

Anyway that's as much as I know about the relationship between BSD and the great budget slash of 1991-2. Oh, yeah, and it also gutted the original disabled student's project that I helped build in the Seventies, turning it into a worthless student service in name only.

Chuck Grimes

PS. I am going to post this because I think it relates to the general thread. I hope you don't mind. Let me know if you do and we can carry this on off-list again.



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list