Sunday, October 24, 2010

The role of UNIX in the development of the Internet

In 1969, the UNIX computer operating system was developed by Ken Thompson of AT&T Bell Laboratories. It has turned out to be one of the most powerful and widely accepted computer operating systems for computer and telephone exchange systems requiring multitasking and multi-user capabilities.

Standard UNIX commands allow for access to computer files, programs, storage and other resources. Encouraged by the hardware volumes purchased by AT&T (American Telegraph and Telephone company), UNIX was quickly adopted by many computer manufacturers as their standard operating system, so that computer programs and other applications written for UNIX could easily be ported (i.e., moved with only very few changes) from one computer system to another.

Most importantly for the development of the Internet, one of the participants in the ARPANET, the University of California in Berkeley, at the request of DARPA, wrote an extension to UNIX to incorporate the newly developed TCP/IP protocols. This version of UNIX was called UNIX 4.2BSD(Berkeley System Distribution). It was immediately used in the ARPANET and was released to the public domain in 1983. It opened the door for rapid further development of applications for file transfer between computers and for a more-widely standardised form of email. The embedding of TCP/IP within UNIX also made UNIX servers the natural choice of hardware for web servers, which would appear later.

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