The 499th patch for 2.11BSD released

This year sees 35 years since 2.11BSD was announced on March 14, 1991 - itself a slightly late celebration of 20 years of the PDP-11 - and January 2026 brought what looks to be the venerable 16-bit OS's biggest ever patch!

Much of the 1.3 MB size is due to Anders Magnusson, well-known for his work on NetBSD and the Portable C Compiler. Since 2.11BSD's stdio was not ANSI compliant, he's ported from 4.4BSD.

BigSneakyDuck at Reddit

There's an incredible amount of work in here on this old variant of BSD, including fixes for old bugs and tons of other changes. This, the 499th patch for 2.11BSD, is so big, in fact, that vi on 2.11BSD can't handle the size of the files, so you're going to need to cut them up with sed, for which instructions are included.

It's quite unique to see such a big update on the 35th anniversary of an operating system.