interface:

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.

The 386BSD specification was in two parts - one that detailed getting to a operational system that could build itself and basic console applications, and a more extensive community involvement part, called "A Modest Proposal".

We decided to shoot for a system that emphasized novel 386 support code to create a basic BSD environment on the 386. We assumed that by making it freely available, others will extend the work to remaining areas.

How to call the system's kernel from a process, using existing industry standards accross the X86 platform.

Support the processor, and support the ISA bus peripherals are the objectives for the first parts of 386BSD.

Since we had a program running in an empty PC, we needed primative input with a keyboard driver for polled input. Used by standalone programs to boot and test parts of the kernel.

Output from our standalone programs was done by a primative display driver to allow standalone programs to display results from bootstrap and test programs. We avoided the BIOS entirely.