history:

The second article in the "PORTING UNIX TO THE 386" series discussed the utilities we had to build to test the port on an actual 80386 PC.
By far, the most popular article.

Why we wrote PC utilities to port UNIX with - the advantage of working from a primitive OS that runs on the absolute machine.

Once the system is debugged and tested, the next step was to load on more code to expand with. So we moved "tar balls" to the swap space with this utility to provide a primative file upload capability.

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.

This article, last of the original three done altogether in 1990, on getting the critical pieces functioning independantly that we needed to do the port. Once these we obtained, the kernel was inevitable.

Understanding the boundary between research and development with BSD, and where a balance between commercial efforts can be struck.