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By Dr.
Philip Baczewski, Director of Academic Computing and User Services
UNIX is
40
and it seems just like yesterday that it was a fresh new OS toddling
around on strange new hardware platforms. When UNIX was born, IBM
mainframes running MVS were the dominant processing systems, and you
didn't have one in your house unless you had a few million dollars
to spare. Now, thanks to LINUX, you can run a version of UNIX on
your laptop if you want to and large business database software such
as Oracle is more likely to be running on UNIX than anything else.
In the beginning ...
The development of UNIX is inextricably linked with the
development of the Internet.* Many of
the first computers connected to the Internet ran UNIX and some of
the first Internet utilities were developed or most common on UNIX
systems. Telnet,
ftp,
sendmail,
BIND, and many of
other fundamental Internet programs were intrinsic to UNIX systems
before they made their way to other platforms. Sendmail and BIND in
particular were developed as part of a UNIX variant programmed at UC
Berkeley named the Berkeley Software Distribution also known as BSD
(which is also the basis for today's Mac OS X.) The
first web
browser was programmed on
a NeXT microcomputer that ran a version of UNIX based on BSD.
Over the years, UNIX systems have served as the Internet servers
that have provided information and services accessible via the
Internet. Yesterday's Internet mail servers and mail routers were
mostly on UNIX systems. Today's World Wide Web servers run on more
UNIX servers than anything else, and the
Apache web
server, which
runs mostly on LINUX, hosts more than 45% of web pages, by most
accounts.
UNT and UNIX
Here at UNT, the UNIX revolution began in
the early 1980s with the acquisition of a Digital Equipment
Corporation VAX minicomputer running a version of UNIX.** This
system was known as the "Research VAX" and was mostly used by
Computer Sciences faculty and students. In the early 1990s, a
new UNIX computer was acquired for use by those doing scientific or
computational research. This computer was made by a company
named Solbourne and was a Sun Microsystems-compatible minicomputer
running Sun OS, a variant of BSD at the time. This system was named
"Sol", both as a variant of "Solbourne" and as an indication of its
status as a large and central computing resource. Sol was the
first UNIX system at UNT to be connected to the Internet.
Previous to its acquisition, UNT's Internet connectivity was based
on VAX computers that ran an operating system named VMS.
In a bit of personal history, I can relate
that when it came time to upgrade the Solbourne's processors, I
found out that the procedure would be to take out the old circuit
boards and replace them with new ones. I suggested to Billy
Barron, the VAX/UNIX manager at that time, that since we'd have
these processor boards left over we should buy a smaller computer
without processor boards and plug them in to make a UNIX computer
that students could access to get onto the Internet and send e-mail.
This led to the creation of a system named "Jove", following a solar
system-based naming convention for our UNIX systems, and was the
first student e-mail system at UNT. So in the
spirit of Al Gore,
I guess I can claim to have invented the Internet at UNT (just
kidding.:)
In the 1990s, Academic Computing's
collection of UNIX systems grew in support of Internet services,
instruction, and research and Internet-based communication became
more and more a part of research, scholarship, and learning.
The Solbourne computers were gradually supplanted by newer versions
of Sun Microsystems equipment. By the mid 1990s, Sun had released
Solaris, which was a version of UNIX known as System V, release 4
(SVR4), which represented a unification of earlier disparate
developments of the UNIX code. But, by the late 1990s, many
Internet services could be accessed on
personal microcomputers
and the dominance of UNIX system as the access to Internet services
began to fade. However, UNIX servers continued and still
occupy a place at the core of Internet operations and services.
Thank a UNIX server
So, the next time that you send an e-mail or
browse a web page, thank a UNIX server. What we've witnessed
in the last 40 years was a remarkable synergy that has created the
online world that we now take for granted. There could have
been an Internet without UNIX or a UNIX without the Internet, yet
together along with the computer technology that grew up with and
round them, they've transformed how we live our lives.
*
Hobbes' Internet Timeline, circa 1994, provides an interesting view
of the history of the Internet and UNIX, and, if you poke around the
rest of that issue of Benchmarks a bit, UNT computing. The
complete (so far) timeline can be found
here.
** See
Computing Center Chronology -
Equipment for a history of the computer purchases etc. at the
University from the 1960s through the early 2000's.
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