>Obviously we have no way of knowing this, but my personal
>opinion is that if it weren't for Unix, the Internet would
>have happened sooner, faster, and better. I've been doing
>Unix for a good two dozen years now, and the contrast between
>it and Multics in terms of open-endedness, modifiability,
>user- and programmer-friendliness, and stability has never
>ceased to bother me.
>
>In fact, I don't recall seeing Unix involved in ARPANET or
>the early Internet much at all. Most hosts were Tenex or
>various Univac or IBM mainframes, and of course the IMPs
>were Honeywell. The first Unix involvement was when the
>Internet assimilated Usenet, and even that was pretty much
>the replacement of the UUCP base with FTP and other file
>transfers.
the first socket code, which is the basis of all contemporary TCP/IP
networking, was developed on BSD unix. BSD is still the only OS with
complete TCP/IP and socket kernel support, because it was baked directly
into the design. granted, the differences in other operating systems are
negligible, but they've all had to be patched or redesigned to support the
network design model BSD created. as i understood it, most of the
protocols for services like email, FTP, and the web were originally
developed on unix platforms.. but i can't substantiate that, except for the
web.
i was also under the impression that the Multics project closed without
ever delivering its final product. i agree that in specification and
design, Multics was light-years beyond unix.. but it was also, to some
degree, vaporware. unix was a minimal, even trivial, subset of the
Multics design, but it actually exists. it's survived and adapted to a
range of real-world deployment that spans decades.
unix certainly isn't perfect, but it's good at a lot of things, including
running network server software. and i've personally found unix
programmer-friendly to the point of nymphomania.
granted, i'm a BSD freak, but i've never found a commercial OS that even
approaches what unix offers in terms of API documentation and access to the
low-level code. there's a definite learning curve if you want to
integrate your code tightly to the kernel, but that's true of any OS. by
definition, no C programming environment is easier to write for than unix,
because the two grew up together. the kernel, the compiler, and the
standard libraries have all evolved in paralell.
unix also has a philosophical association with the hackers who made the
internet what it is. it's an OS which was developed by people who were
willing to pass their ideas around and see what other people had to say.
centralized development can't match that in terms of resources or
flexibility.
an internet based on the same ideas in the Multics development effort would
have been much smoother and conceptually unified, but i question whether it
ever would have made it out of the corporate server pens. i remember Tim
Berners-Lee once saying that if he got a dollar every time someone clicks a
link, he'd be richer than Bill Gates, but the web never would have gotten
off his desk at CERN if that were the case, either.
the easygoing nature of the unix community has allowed a *lot* of resources
to be plowed back in for further development. the business types who
think they have a right to make a profit off the net because they provide
content don't realize how many hundreds of millions of dollars worth of
development effort they're getting for free.
Chomsky says "the God is in the grammar" when it comes to the relationship
between philosophy and language. the same is true of unix and the
internet. the 'net as we know it is an emergent property of the unix
operating system and the development efforts which went into the building
it. maybe other versions of the internet could have existed, but i doubt
it. certainly, no other OS's potential internet was strong enough to edge
out the one we have today. the principles of science suggest that this
one, therefore, is probably the closest to being right.
mike stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 'net geek..
been there, done that, have network, will travel.
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