Written from memory 20 years later.
Big visit this evening from the people from Walnut Creek CDROM, who were exhibiting at some
exhibition in Hannover. Book fair,
maybe? In particular there were Jack Velte and Greg Long, and also Rod Grimes. Not Jordan
Hubbard, though, whom I had wanted to meet: he had gone
to Hamburg to pick up Søren Schmidt, who
was coming in from København, and who
you would think didn't really need picking up. And why did he fly to Hamburg anyway? It's
only a little more than half the way to Hannover. The last time I flew from København was,
coincidentally, directly to Hannover.
Yvonne put on a big dinner for everybody—there must have been
a total of 6 of them, though I don't remember who the others were.
While they were there, I showed Jack and Greg the drafts of “Porting UNIX Software”, which O'Reilly and Associates were in the process of
publishing. They were very interested, and Jack said “Can't you write a book about how to
install FreeBSD? Doesn't need to be long,
just about 50 pages or so.”
At the time I had installed FreeBSD on a
couple of machines, but my operating system of choice
was BSD/OS. The idea sounded like fun,
though, and so I quickly hacked together a few pages. Jack and Greg liked what they saw,
and so we went ahead. I had gained some experience with using groff while writing
“Porting UNIX Software”, and as the result of some production issues that I had had with
that book, we agreed that I would do the entire formatting and supply the book in PostScript
format.
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