Status of 4.3BSD

[Kirk Mckusick]

At the June Usenix conference we announced that we expected to begin 
shipping production 4.3BSD systems in mid to late August. Two weeks
after the Usenix meeting we shipped what we then thought was our beta
distribution tape. The following week our primary funding agency, DARPA,
informed us that we were required to replace our version of TCP/IP
with that supplied by BBN. After a great deal of discussion, we 
agreed to include both implementations and let individual sites
choose which version they wanted to configure their kernels to use.
BBN delivered their implementation to us on August 30th. We must now
put together another beta tape with the new kernel and restart the
beta testing (in particular we must give BBN time to work on their
networking code, as it does not interface to many of the utilities).
Assuming that we are not required to make any further changes to the
distribution, we now anticipate that full distribution will begin
before the end of the year.

On the bright side of this fiasco, we have had time to add support
for VAX 8600's with Massbus and Unibus (but not ci) peripherals.
We have also had time to gain experience with the name server software.

We thank you for your patience and apologize for the delay. All 4.2
licensees will be notified when the full distribution is available.
We currently expect that 4.2 licensees will pay $500 for an upgrade
to 4.3. New licensees will pay $1000.

	Kirk McKusick
	CSRG