The impact of University of NSW on the world of Computing.
Initial Author: Steve Jenkin, 4th August 2003.
(???) against unconfirmed data.
- history of Unix
Abstract:Most computer systems today, from Mainframes down to PC's, can trace a direct line back to UNSW and its work on Unix in the late 1970's. It played a pivotal role as an 'enabler' or catalyst in the growth of Unix and the explosion in computing research and services it engendered as the symbiotic relationship between Unix and 'the Internet'.evolved.
UNSW was one of the key initiators of the “Open Software” movement as we now know it, providing major input to the first full “BSD” release and continuing
The 'firsts' UNSW took part in are impressive: first O/S course, first full commentary on an O/S, first O/S, port, first email system outside AT&T, first non-research site outside AT&T.
The relative obscurity of Unix's successor, “Plan 9”, compared to the later written Linux is as close to proof as possible that UNSW's 'enabler' role was necessary for the growth, acceptance and success of Unix.
A History
Over the summer of ’69 Thompson and Ritchie designed and crafted the over 20,000 lines of code for the ‘C’ language and ‘Version 6’ of the Unix kernel on a PDP-11. The Bell Labs ‘computer science research’ team then built the many tools and commands completing ‘Unix’.
By late 1974, their work on Unix was published by the ACM who gave them both ‘Turing Awards in 1983. Unix was a ‘research project’ for its creators.
In mid 1975, one of the hundreds of Unix tapes sold to Universities came to John Lions at UNSW.
In 1976, the first undergraduate course in Operating Systems studying the source of a live system was given at UNSW by John. The formatted source and its associated commentary was published in 1977. This course is still novel and innovative.
Richard Miller, an undergraduate (???) at Woollongong University under Prof. Juris Reinfelds, performed the first port of Unix to another platform – the Perkin Elmer 4/32 (??? 8/32?) in 1977 – well ahead of the next port by Bell Labs to the Vax in May 1979. The running system was achieved on the second attempt – an exceptional feat. Prof. Reinfelds later instigated “The Woollongong Group”, an US based company selling TCP/IP and Unix products.
At UNSW a core group from this early cadre of students and staff formed, improving the Version 6 kernel and tools – Maltby, Rose, Johnstone, Harris and O’Brien (???). They added significant design features, addressed performance and scaling issues, remediated bugs and exchanged source and patches from contributors world-wide.
The newly created Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM) took the unprecedented & highly adventurous step of running its entire faculty on Unix in 1979 (???) – becoming (maybe?) the first non-research site outside AT&T. AGSM used in-house staff and the University source licence to support and maintain their systems.
Such was the success of Unix, its flexibility and performance advantage, that UNSW converted all the ‘batch stations’ running in the faculties as card-reader/printer front-ends for the Cyber mainframe to Unix in 1977 (???).
Sydney University also started working in Unix, spawning the first inter-site Unix mail system in 1977 (???), evolving into the Australian backbone e-mail system, ACSnet. This provided e-mail, newgroups, file transfer and more until the advent of AARNET in 1989 and its provision of general Internet connectivity to Universities. Non-academic users of ACSnet then had to make alternative arrangements.
1978 saw the CSRG [Computer Systems Research Group] form at UCB. On 9th May, 1978 they released their ‘1 BSD’ [Berkley System Distribution] comprising only tools and commands. 10th may 1979 saw the release of “2 BSD”, a full-fledged release including a kernel. UNSW had contributed its “Definitive Source” for the start of the BSD releases.
The CSRG at UCB closed in 1992/3 (???) after 15 years with the release of BSD 4.3. The source tree became FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. A commercial release, BSDi has since been folded back into FreeBSD.
By this time BSD had accumulated or embedded;
-LAN & WAN
-- TCP/IP
-portable kernel
-portable ‘C’ compiler
-e-mail, ftp, telnet
-DNS
-Remote commands – login, shell, copy, backup, print
The Internet, TCP/IP, started before and separately from Unix in ~1965 as a DARPA project. The reliable, robust and very cheap BSD implementation caused an explosion in use of Unix. The two communities formed a symbiotic relationship – each fuelling the others growth and increasing usefulness.
SUN Microsystems, formed out of Stanford University in 1980 (???) contributed NFS (Network File System) and many other features, culminating the remerging of the BSD and AT&T code streams in System V.4 in 1995 (???)
Unix thrived in spite of AT&T, its initial owners. Only in 1992 did AT&T release a supported version of Unix – “System V” when free of the IBM/AT&T ‘consent decree’. Instead of taking and building upon the free BSD source, AT&T management directed an incompatible variant built with much functionality re-implemented, incompatibly, and many features omitted, such as a full-screen editor. The pricing of source code was also dramatically increased and the code not made available back to the BSD community.
This intentional incompatibility led to years of market fractioning, “Unix Wars” and finally litigation against BSDi in 1992 [resolved in 1994 by the new owners, SCO]. This decision directly engendered both the rise of Microsoft’s “Windows NT”, the Free Software Foundation’s [FSF] re-implementation of Unix tools and commands in the GNU project and the rise of the Linux kernel [starting in late 1991].
The strong Unix philosophies of “less is more”, smaller is better, and “one took, one task – done exceptionally” were lost.
1990 saw Tim Berners-Lee of CERN propose and build the “World Wide Web” – file sharing and document viewing on a global scale. This was built on Unix and the Internet. By 1994, the Web had changed the world of computing – and entered the world of the general public.
The free availability of robust, reliable, high performance source and the choice of many affordable computing platforms, caused an explosion of research in computing in general and operating systems in particular. The UNSW books on Unix by John Lions in no small way supported this globally. Because of a ban by AT&T on their reproduction, the books became the largest ever ‘underground’ computing tracts.
Some of the significant developments fuelled in this way:
-X-11, a Unix Graphical User Interface & Windowing, from the X-11 Consortium led by MIT
-Mach, a ‘microkernel’ able to support many Operating Systems, from Carnegie Mellon
-Kerberos, general and portable security system
-Perl from NIST
-Sendmail(for email), BIND (for DNS) ftp, apache (web server), …
-Tripwire, COPS, crack, … - network security tools
-First firewall from Marcus Ranum et al
-GNU from the FSF
-Linux
Some things not touched on:
-UNIX as a trademark
-SCO and the Open Group acquiring the trademark
-SAMBA
UNSW’s impact
Bell Labs created Unix – but as a research project.
UNSW spawned “Open Source” as we know it now, along with a ‘useful’ kernel with good tools and commands, the first non-research use of Unix outside AT&T, the definitive commentary on the Unix kernel – still in use, e-mail and file transfers and enabled /supported the first ‘port’.
UNSW provided the base for the UCB-CSRG “2 BSD” kernel.
BSD formed the basis of the current top three commercial Unix vendors – SUN (Solaris), IBM (AIX), Hewlett-Packard (HP/UX).
BSD prompted the GNU and Linux re-implementations of Unix.
The popularity of Unix and its many variants caused the IEEE to create the POSIX standard.
The availability of TCP/IP on Unix, along with the source code for the kernel ‘stack’, hardware and protocol drivers and the general system architecture (sockets), directly spawned ‘the Internet’, leading directly to the ‘World Wide Web’.
X-11, Mach and FreeBSD were picked up by Apple and combined into ‘Darwin’ – the basis of Apple’s OS X.
Microsoft has licensed Mach, licensed the Unix “file system switch” from AT&T, picked up TCP/IP, used the free NCSA Mosaic browser as the basis of ‘Internet Explorer’ and used {DNS, LDAP and Kerberos} as its “Active Directory”.
Even IBM mainframes now natively support TCP/IP and are POSIX compliant.
IBM now offers just one operating system across all its platforms – Linux.
The legacy of the 1976 Operating Systems course at UNSW is a completely changed computing landscape.
UNSW was the ‘enabler’ or catalyst in the adoption and growth of Unix – just as UCB’s CSRG was the critical engine through its BSD releases.
A Question or two
How can we know that UNSW really was so crucial? Wouldn’t Unix just have happened anyway?
We have a data point – the successor to Unix produced by its creators.
By 1990 the original team used their accumulated knowledge and experience to create a successor to Unix – as big a step forward as Unix was over 20 years before. This new system is small, fast, portable and extremely powerful. It was expressly designed to support the world’s largest corporations, such as AT&T. In keeping with their irreverent humour, it was christened ‘Plan 9’ after the film.
But what has happened to ‘Plan 9’?
It has been eclipsed by Linux. The rapid take-up of Linux, its rise to the leading edge and the extensive resources contributed towards it, show that there has been a huge pent-up demand for a vendor-free operating system. ‘Plan 9’ was earlier, more complete, still has some capabilities far beyond Linux and is much smaller. It was sold initially as source on a CD-ROM along with two volumes covering its design and philosophies. ‘Plan 9’ was released as “Open Source” in late 2000 when its main author, Ken Thompson, left Bell Labs after more than 30 years.
The critical element, the ‘enabler’, was missing.
Why did UNSW fall away from the leading edge in Unix?
Distance, the “Australian Cringe”, and the inability of the University management (???) to understand what had been accomplished.