 | |
| Industry | Software publishing |
|---|---|
| Founded | August 1991; 34 years ago (1991-08) inWalnut Creek, California |
| Founder | Bob Bruce |
| Defunct | 2001; 24 years ago (2001) |
| Fate | Restructured and renamediXsystems |
Walnut Creek CDROM Inc. was an early provider offreeware,shareware, andfree software onCD-ROMs. The company was founded by Bob Bruce inWalnut Creek, California, in August 1991. It was one of the first commercial distributors of free software on CD-ROMs. The company produced hundreds of titles on CD-ROMs, and ran the busiestFTP site on theInternet, ftp.cdrom.com, for many years.
In the early years, some of the most popular products wereSimtelshareware forMS-DOS, CICA Shareware forMicrosoft Windows, and theAminet archives for theAmiga. In January 1994,[1] it published a collection of 350 texts fromProject Gutenberg, one of the first published ebook collections.
Walnut Creek developed a close relationship with theFreeBSDUnix-likeopen sourceoperating system project from its inception in 1993. The company published FreeBSD on CD-ROM, distributed it by FTP, employed FreeBSD project foundersJordan Hubbard and David Greenman, ran FreeBSD on itsservers, sponsored FreeBSD conferences, and published FreeBSD books, includingThe Complete FreeBSD. By 1997, FreeBSD was Walnut Creek's "most successful product", according to Bruce.[2] From 1995 onwards, Walnut Creek was also the official publisher ofSlackware Linux.[3] Walnut Creek also gained fame for itsidgamessubdirectory, which was the de facto distribution center for theDoom-engine modification community at the time.
As more users gained access tohigh-speed Internet connections, demand for software on physical media decreased dramatically. The companymerged withBerkeley Software Design Inc. (BSDI) in 2000 to focus more engineering effort on the similar FreeBSD andBSD/OS operating systems. Soon after, BSDI acquiredTelenet System Solutions, Inc., anInternet infrastructure server supplier.[4]
The software assets of BSDI (FreeBSD, Slackware, BSD/OS) were acquired byWind River Systems in 2001, and the remainder of the company renamed itselfiXsystems.[5] Wind River dropped sponsorship of Slackware soon afterwards,[6] while the FreeBSD unit was divested as a separate entity in 2002 asFreeBSD Mall, Inc.[2] Also, theidgames and related archives moved to 3D Gamers in October 2001.[7]
iXsystems' server business was acquired in 2002 byOffmyserver, which reverted to the iXsystems name in 2005.[8] In February 2007, iXsystems acquired FreeBSD Mall.[9]
Walnut Creek CDROM's URL[10] for a time was redirected toSimtel.net[11] but is now "Page not found", as is SimTel (was shut down on March 15, 2013[12]).
| People | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Derivatives |
| ||||
| Companies | |||||
| Other topics | |||||
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
