T171 - TMA04

Name: Lois Ann Morris    PI: T8318286    Date: 31st August 2001.

Report Plan

This is the plan for my report.

Back to main report "Unix and its influence on the Internet".

Introduction    The beginnings of UNIX.

- describe the development of UNIX by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.
- explain reason why AT&T effectively gave UNIX away to academic institutions
- license to use UNIX allowed alterations to source code and distribution of altered code.
- UNIX became very popular in computer science departments.
- many experienced programmers contributed code to UNIX - wide collaborative effort
- many variants of UNIX developed by different companies for specific tasks

Section 1 UNIX and TCP/IP.

- important development - Cerf and Kahn's paper establishing principles of TCP protocol
- adoption of TCP/IP as an 'open standard'.
- US Department of Defense standardised its computer operating systems - choosing UNIX.
- importance of 4.2BSD produced by University of California Berkeley.
- UNIX became proprietary software and prohibitively expensive.
- led to UCB splitting off the TCP/IP protocol code it had written from BSD and releasing it separately.
- relaxed licensing terms saw code quickly integrated into other variants of UNIX
- UCB developed an Open Source UNIX clone from which FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD are derived.

Section 2 UNIX and the Open Source Software movement.

- ongoing work to develop Open Source UNIX called 'GNU' by Richard Stallman
- development of UNIX clone kernel by Linus Torvalds - the beginning of Linux
- importance of GNU Manifesto and GNU General Public License
- Stallman is at the heart of the Open Source Software versus Proprietary Software debate.
- infamous 'Halloween Documents' prove that Microsoft takes Open Source threat seriously.
- combination of UNIX or Linux plus Apache web server in widespread use throughout the Internet.

Section 3 UNIX and Usenet.

- mechanism required for updating UNIX with patches and bug fixes
- development of UUCP - incorporated into UNIX V7 distributed in 1979
- UUCP used by students in North Carolina to exchange updated files between three computers across telephone network
- created a program to automate process called 'Netnews', followed by an improved version called 'News Version A'
- 1986 - adoption of TCP/IP protocol and new NNTP protocol developed at UCB - both 'open standard' protocols
- ARPANET and Usenet intersected at UCB and allowed wider access to much greater information

Conclusions - the significance of UNIX.

- result of programmers writing own software when supplied software not suitable
- one of many chance happenings in the history of computing
- brief review of UNIX's contribution:
    - to the spread of TCP/IP
    - as a forerunner of Open Source Software
    - as the unintended mechanism for the creation of Usenet
- list current important Open Source Software
- mention growth of Linux - will it be a viable alternative to Windows?
- UNIX is regarded as a way of life, a philosophy, even a religion by its users (finish on humorous note....)

Name: Lois Ann Morris    PI: T8318286    Date: 31st August 2001

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