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OpenBSD/cats: the enabler
During the 1990s, some users of home computers wanted to be able to run a Unix-like operating system on their machines.
There was a group of people working on porting the BSD codebase to the Commodore Amiga, another to the Atari Falcon, and in the United Kingdom, another group working on porting BSD to the Acorn RiscPC. There were also similar efforts targeting Linux, rather than BSD.
Eventually, all these BSD porting efforts merged in NetBSD, in which the port to the RiscPC, initially called RiscBSD and led by Mark Brinicombe, became NetBSD/arm32 at the end of january 1996.
At this time, the OpenBSD code was synced with the NetBSD code on an irregular basis, and OpenBSD obtained these arm32 bits shortly after; but there was noone, among the OpenBSD developers, interested in making OpenBSD/arm32 a reality (probably because none of them had an Acorn RiscPC, as these were quite rare outside the UK.)
Eventually, the vestigial ARM code in OpenBSD was removed in early 2001.
That's all folks! Stay tuned for another OpenBSD story next week!
Ok, the story was not quite finished. Far from it.
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