# Ancient Web: Poul-Henning Kamp Left a 2004 FreeBSD Homepage in Place Poul-Henning Kamp's preserved FreeBSD personal homepage lists his operating-system contributions, precision-time experiments, older software projects, and Beerware license philosophy. 2026-10-10 :: Switchboard Tech Services ![Ancient Web: Poul-Henning Kamp Left a 2004 FreeBSD Homepage in Place](https://switchboardtechservices.com/static/images/defaults/articles.webp) Part of the [Ancient Web Collection](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/ancient-web-collection/). Poul-Henning Kamp begins his personal homepage by joking that everyone said he needed one, then complained when he failed to update it. His answer is to leave it looking like a working programmer's business card from a very specific era. [Visit Poul-Henning Kamp's FreeBSD homepage](https://people.freebsd.org/~phk/). The page's revision marker reads **October 24, 2004**. Kamp calls himself a Unix specialist and recalls working with FreeBSD since before the project officially existed, when he had 386BSD running on a laptop previously using Minix. He says he served on the FreeBSD core team from early 1994 until the project moved toward an elected core team about six years later. A list of contributions includes release engineering for FreeBSD 2.x, virtual-filesystem name caching, device management, disk transformations, the jail mechanism, and encryption features. These are the maintainer's descriptions of his own work; the page does not substitute for a complete, independently audited contribution history. But the candid, named list gives readers a valuable map of the problems that operating-system developers spent years solving. ## The laboratory beside the license The lower half of the page becomes a set of personal technical notes. Kamp recounts software for **HP48 calculators**, an old SCSI-ping utility, TCL/SNMP experiments, and work on timing hardware. He describes testing receivers associated with GPS, Loran-C, and radio time signals as part of a precision-clock laboratory. Another section is devoted to the **Beerware license**. Kamp explains why he dislikes long legal documents for software he intends to give away, and why he chose a short, informal permission notice instead. He is arguing for a particular view of software freedom, not offering a legal opinion with universal acceptance. One paragraph even complains that nobody pays him full time to develop FreeBSD, although he thinks somebody should. In a modern corporate biography, such a remark might vanish in editing. Here it sits beside the technical achievements. The homepage directs readers to another site for more current activity and jokes about a planned update in 2009. That is a clear warning against interpreting the old professional status and contact details as current. Its value is the artifact as a whole: release engineering, a hardware hobbyist's experiments, and strong opinions about open-source licensing all fitting into one small page. [Explore the dated homepage and its FreeBSD project links](https://people.freebsd.org/~phk/). Part of the [Ancient Web Collection](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/ancient-web-collection/). - Categories: [Ancient Web](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/categories/ancient-web/) - Tags: [#ancientweb](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/ancientweb/), [#unix](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/unix/), [#freebsd](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/freebsd/), [#open-source-history](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/open-source-history/) [Articles RSS](https://switchboardtechservices.com/feeds/articles.xml "Subscribe using an RSS reader") --- Canonical URL: https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/ancient-web-poul-henning-kamp-left-a-2004-freebsd-homepage-in-place/ Language: en-us Content type: article Author: Switchboard Tech Services Published: 2026-10-10T17:08:47+00:00 Modified: 2026-10-18T21:04:16.572044+00:00