>> Ещё версия: на его студне-щебродском 386SX не ставился FreeBSD (или какой-то из предков), требовавший тогда сопроцессора.

Гм, Вирзениус пишет "+ i387"...

  * Jan 5, 1991 bought his first PC (i386 + i387 + 4 MiB RAM and a small hard disk);

--http://blog.liw.fi/posts/linux25/

> 386BSD вышла какбы на пол-года позже Linux.

Да, наверное...

1991: Jan: 21yo Linus Torvalds buys 33MHz 386sx PC w/40Mb drive to play 'Prince of Persia' (hardware prices dropping dramatically), begins hacking Linux in April
Jan 1991 to Jul 1992: Dr Dobbs publishes series by William Jolitz on porting BSD to 386 
||1991: Feb? Berkeley includes Jolitz's free-but-incomplete 386 BSD on updated Networking Release 2
1991: 17Mar: William and Lynne Jolitz release version 0.0 of 386 port of BSD (386BSD released as free)
||no-date: Linus writes terminal emulator (or standalone newsreader?) for 386
1991: 25Aug: Linus solicits os-suggestions from comp.os.minix
1992: BSDI releases beta of BSD/386

--compiled off of http://www.landley.net/history/mirror/robotwisdom/386.html + http://www.landley.net/history/mirror/robotwisdom/timeline.html

...
.
.....

"" As far as I recall, 386BSD 0.0 was released about the same time as early Linux kernels. 386BSD was a complete system in the sense that it had all tools (which Linux didn't, originally), but the PC port was very flaky. For example, 386BSD 0.0 required a math coprocessor to work. FreeBSD and NetBSD appeared months later. "" --https://lists.gt.net/linux/kernel/16511#16511

Жуткая, стра-а-ашная археология. Not, панимашь, available и "даже нее смотрел" (интервью по ссылке с WP:).

"Linus Torvalds has said that if 386BSD or the GNU kernel had been available at the time, he probably would not have created Linux" --https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution...