In the early years, some of the most popular products were
Simtel shareware for
MS-DOS, CICA Shareware for
Microsoft Windows, and the
Aminet archives for the
Amiga. In January 1994, it published a collection of 350 texts from
Project Gutenberg, one of the first published ebook collections. Walnut Creek developed a close relationship with the
FreeBSD Unix-like open source operating system project from its inception in 1993. The company published FreeBSD on CD-ROM, distributed it by FTP, employed FreeBSD project founders
Jordan Hubbard and David Greenman, ran FreeBSD on its
servers, sponsored FreeBSD conferences, and published FreeBSD books, including
The Complete FreeBSD. By 1997, FreeBSD was Walnut Creek's "most successful product", according to Bruce. From 1995 onwards, Walnut Creek was also the official publisher of
Slackware Linux. Walnut Creek also gained fame for its idgames
subdirectory, which was the de facto distribution center for the
Doom-engine modification community at the time. As more users gained access to
high-speed Internet connections, demand for software on physical media decreased dramatically. The company
merged with
Berkeley Software Design Inc. (BSDI) in 2000 to focus more engineering effort on the similar FreeBSD and
BSD/OS operating systems. Soon after, BSDI acquired
Telenet System Solutions, Inc., an
Internet infrastructure server supplier. The software assets of BSDI (FreeBSD, Slackware, BSD/OS) were acquired by
Wind River Systems in 2001, and the remainder of the company renamed itself
iXsystems. Wind River dropped sponsorship of Slackware soon afterwards, while the FreeBSD unit was divested as a separate entity in 2002 as
FreeBSD Mall, Inc. iXsystems' server business was acquired in 2002 by
Offmyserver, which reverted to the iXsystems name in 2005. In February 2007, iXsystems acquired FreeBSD Mall. Walnut Creek CDROM's URL for a time was redirected to
Simtel.net but is now "Page not found", as is SimTel (was shut down on March 15, 2013). ==References==