Mike Karels, of 4.4 BSD Fame, Has Died

Michael 'Mike' Karels, one of the authors of "The Design and Implementation of the 4.4Bsd Operating System" and a part of the Computer Systems Research Group at Berkeley, who received the USENIX Association Lifetime Achievement Award, has died. Longtime Slashdot reader bplipschitz shared the news.

The FreeBSD Foundation issued a statement in memory of Karels: "We are deeply saddened about the passing of Mike Karels, a pivotal figure in the history of BSD UNIX, a respected member of the FreeBSD community, and the Deputy Release Engineer for the FreeBSD Project. Mike's contributions to the development and advancement of BSD systems were profound and have left an indelible mark on the Project. Mike's vision and dedication were instrumental in shaping the FreeBSD we know and use today. His legacy will continue to inspire and guide us in our future endeavors."

RIP Mike. FreeBSD contributed a LOT to FOSS.

[gavron]

TL;DR AT&T claimed the rights to Unix and its derivatives. The BSD movement (Berkeley Software Design) started the movement what would "free Unix" from AT&T, allow FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSDi to thrive. This allowed people to run Unix on their 3B2s, PDP-11s, VAXen, and x386 systems.

Thank you for being a big part of this, Mark, as well as the other giants who all stood together, having raised themselves up (by their bootstraps) to stand on each other's shoulders.

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[AmiMoJo]

I remember reading this book back in the day. It was very informative and a good general introduction to modern operating systems.

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[Seven Spirals]

It was required reading for my OPSYS 200 course. Loved it.

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[imp]

A few nits: He worked at CSRG which produced BSD, Berkeley Software Distribution. It wasn't the BSD movement, but the efforts to rewrite Unix to get rid of AT&T IP was started at CSRG after 4.3BSD was released, and Mike did a lot of work there. 2BSD did run on the PDP-11s, and 2.11BSD was the best release to run on larger PDP-11s. 3B2s never had BSD support: it was pure System Vr2 and later from AT&T (with a BSD networking stack ported later). Lately he had also been contributing a lot to FreeBSD an

Big, really big influence on Slackware

[dowhileor]

I remember early slackware being mis-footprinted as bsd 4.4 sometimes. I even saw bsd 4.5 on rare occasions......

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[imp]

Unless you were at Krik McKusick's house, you never saw 4.5BSD :). It never existed.

Kirk, author of UFS and manager of CSRG for a time, has a listing on his bookshelf that's labeled "4.5BSD." However, it really really is a snapshot between 4BSD and what would become 4.1BSD. CSRG's follow on release to 4BSD was going to be 5BSD and this listing was half way to that. AT&T asked them not to do that (after this listing was produced and labeled), so they went with 4.1BSD for reasons to extensive to go into h

Mike was a humble giant who walked among us.

[imp]

CSRG, the computer group at Berkeley enhanced AT&T's 7th Edition Unix under contract to DARPA to make it faster and add networking. They distributed the results as the Berkeley Software Distribution. Mike was the release engineer for several of these releases, first on the PDP-11 (for 2.9BSD) and later for 4.3BSD, the interim releases and 4.4BSD. Most recently, he'd accepted the role of being release engineer for the next FreeBSD release (13.4) and was also active in improving Raspberry Pi5 support as well as all the low level moving parts of getting FreeBSD running on the M1 and friends. His whole career is too long to mention here.

He was an absolute joy. I always loved seeing him at different conferences, most recently at BSDcan 2024 just last week. I talked with him about a number of things, had dinner with him and hung out with him for a while at the after social party. I'm still in shock that he's gone.

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[Seven Spirals]

Thanks for sharing that. We'll all miss him. He was indeed a masterful programmer and great person.