NetBSD/atari History

The Atari port of NetBSD became available to the public in March 1995. The first formal release was NetBSD 1.1. The most recent formal release is NetBSD 9.2.

The NetBSD/atari port started out with the NetBSD 1.0 sources. As a basis, Leo Weppelman took the Amiga-port, since this port seemed to be the best fit to the Atari hardware he had at that time - a TT030. This turned out a good starting point and within a few months he had something derived that did actually run on his TT030.

The Atari-port was announced to the NetBSD core team in December 1994. It still took some time to get it into shape. Finally, at the end of March 1995, the Atari port became an initial part of NetBSD.

At that time, NetBSD/atari only ran on an TT030. It didn't take long before requests started coming in for a Falcon port... Making the initial Falcon port was a tedious experience for all people involved. The problem was that Leo didn't own a Falcon and the people owning a Falcon were unable to compile their own kernels because they were lacking a decent bootstrap environment (a la NetBSD/atari ;-). After lots of retries, the initial problems - most of them in the SCSI area - were solved. This took about 5 tiresome months.

Now that the basic building blocks were in place, the time left before the first NetBSD release that included Atari support (1.1), was spent fixing lots of bugs and smoothing sharp edges.

Somewhere in 1996, Leo bought an Hades. Hades support was added at the end that year. The Hades architecture opened the door to various ISA and PCI cards. NetBSD 1.3 was the first release supporting the Hades.

The latest addition to the NetBSD/Atari line is the Milan. The first, yet still a bit experimental, support was added in NetBSD 1.6.

For those of you that are/were part of the NetBSD/atari history: