About me

Information about me are available here.

Personal website is available at dpasek.uw.cz

Contact

Email: david.pasek (at) gmail.com

LinkedIn: David Pasek (cdave)

Reddit: u/David-Pasek

Twitter: @david_pasek

My FreeBSD History 

My journey with FreeBSD began back in 1997.

1986-1997 Prior to Using FreeBSD

I began my IT journey in 1986 at the age of 12, full of curiosity and excitement about computers. Between 1986 and 1988, we used 8-bit computers made in Czechoslovakia. We used machines like the Didaktik Gama and PMD-85 programming them in BASIC language.

In 1989, I got an Atari 800 XL from my parents. I used BASIC and occasionally assembler when needed.

In high school (1988-1992) we used IQ-151 with PASCAL programming language and later in 1991 we have got the first 16-bit PC-XT with DOS and we used Borland Turbo Pascal. Pascal was commonly used in high schools as a teaching language for programming fundamentals.

I used DOS + Borland Turbo Pascal with Turbo Vision to build lot of usefull applications in old good text user interface (TUI). Later I switched to WIN3.11 + Borland DELPHI to develop GUI applications.    

During my Computer Science studies (1992–1996) at university, we were introduced to the UNIX operating system, the C programming language, and shell scripting. I quickly realized that the UNIX philosophy deeply resonated with me.

In 1996, I started working for the first commercial ISP in Czechia, where the infrastructure was based on HP-UX. Between 1997 and 1998, HP-UX was decommissioned and gradually replaced by services on FreeBSD.

1997 

I recall testing Linux Red Hat 4.2 (not RHEL) and FreeBSD 2.2.5 in 1997 to determine my next preferred Operating System. Walnut Creek CD-ROM was a big factor in those days, as the Internet was just at the beginning and downloading 4 CDs over 32 Kbps modem would take 2 days. Although I worked for an ISP, we started in 1996 with just 128 Kb/s of international connectivity :-) and gradually increased the bandwidth over time. Back then, even on an ISP-grade connection, downloading four CDs was a painfully slow and frustrating experience. Walnut Creek used to ship CD-ROMs from the United States through standard postal services.

FreeBSD 2.2.5 Walnut Creek CDROM

2004

After several years of daily FreeBSD usage on production servers, I’ve become increasingly curious about its design and implementation details.

The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System

 

2025

After nearly 30 years of working with FreeBSD and 20 years of experience with VMware data center technologies (vSphere/ESXi, vSAN, NSX) on physical servers, running FreeBSD in virtual machines, and using macOS on desktops and laptops, I’ve come to realize that FreeBSD now has the potential to be seamlessly deployed across the entire stack.

That’s why I’ve started exploring various FreeBSD technologies for both data center and laptop use cases, and documenting my findings here on the blog.