4.3BSD:

This, the first article, is the first published mention of 386BSD. By this time, the project had been operational for 18 months, and William Jolitz was at Berkeley working on the Net/2 release.
In this installment, we discussed the beginning of our project and the initial framework that guided our efforts, in particular, the development of the 386BSD specification.

We'd gathered books and equipment to begin the port in 1989. Most critical was the Crawford and Gelsinger book.
We went through many PCs, most of them portables. Compaq sent a DeskPro 386, and SystemPro 386 & 486.

Our methodology was to prove that we could get a usable, tested executable across onto the native machine to be useful there. As we found and fixed, this methodology sped getting enough good and working native components, such that we could begin native development.

A breakdown of the various uses of the root filesystems, and the considerations for each as we prove out the operation of the system step by step.