[2][3] BSD's development was begun initially by Bill Joy, who added virtual memory capability to Unix running on a VAX-11 computer.

[3] In the 1980s, BSD was widely adopted by workstation vendors in the form of proprietary Unix distributions such as DEC Ultrix and Sun Microsystems SunOS due to its permissive licensing and familiarity to many technology company founders and engineers.

The kernel of 32V was largely rewritten to include Berkeley graduate student Özalp Babaoğlu's virtual memory implementation, and a complete operating system including the new kernel, ports of the 2BSD utilities to the VAX, and the utilities from 32V was released as 3BSD at the end of 1979.

Nonetheless, the 4.3BSD-Tahoe port (June 1988) proved valuable, as it led to a separation of machine-dependent and machine-independent code in BSD which would improve the system's future portability.

In addition to portability, the CSRG worked on an implementation of the OSI network protocol stack, improvements to the kernel virtual memory system and (with Van Jacobson of LBL) new TCP/IP algorithms to accommodate the growth of the Internet.

This led to Networking Release 1 (Net/1), which was made available to non-licensees of AT&T code and was freely redistributable under the terms of the BSD license.

Net/2 was the basis for two separate ports of BSD to the Intel 80386 architecture: the free 386BSD by William and Lynne Jolitz, and the proprietary BSD/386 (later renamed BSD/OS) by Berkeley Software Design (BSDi).

A further condition of the settlement was that USL would not file further lawsuits against users and distributors of the Berkeley-owned code in the upcoming 4.4BSD release.

Since then, several variants based directly or indirectly on 4.4BSD-Lite (such as FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and DragonFly BSD) have been maintained.

Starting with the 8th Edition, versions of Research Unix at Bell Labs had a close relationship to BSD.

A Unix implementation of IP's predecessor, the ARPAnet's NCP, with FTP and Telnet clients, had been produced at the University of Illinois in 1975, and was available at Berkeley.

[19] By integrating sockets with the Unix operating system's file descriptors, it became almost as easy to read and write data across a network as it was to access a disk.

Early versions of BSD were used to form Sun Microsystems' SunOS, founding the first wave of popular Unix workstations.

This is much simpler and faster than emulation; for example, it allows applications intended for Linux to be run at effectively full speed.

This makes BSDs not only suitable for server environments, but also for workstation ones, given the increasing availability of commercial or closed-source software for Linux only.