BDS stands for “Berkeley Software Distribution.” It was a version of the UNIX operating system that was developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley.
The CSRG began developing BDS in 1977, as a derivative of AT&T UNIX. They added a number of new features and improvements to the operating system, such as virtual memory, improved networking, and a new version of the UNIX command line shell.
BDS was used in many universities and research institutions, and it was known for its stability and performance. However, it was not as widely adopted as other versions of UNIX, such as those from AT&T and Sun Microsystems.
Development of BDS was stopped in the mid-1990s, in favor of freely available operating systems such as Linux. Some of the technology that was developed for BDS, such as the TCP/IP networking stack and the BSD filesystem, were later adopted and integrated into other operating systems, including Apple’s OS X and various versions of Linux.
Although Berkeley distribution is no longer developed, it has been influential in many areas in Operating systems and also it has been used in some commercial products as a base for different distributions.