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Unix Programming - What Unix Gets Right - The Internet and the World Wide Web
The Internet and the World Wide Web
The Defense Department's contract for the first production
TCP/IP stack went to a
Unix development group because the Unix in question was largely open
source. Besides
TCP/IP, Unix has
become the one indispensable core technology of the Internet Service
Provider industry. Ever since the demise of the TOPS family of operating
systems in the
mid-1980s, most Internet server machines (and effectively all above
the PC level) have relied on Unix.
Not even
Microsoft's awesome
marketing clout has been able to dent Unix's lock on the
Internet. While the
TCP/IP standards (on
which the Internet is based) evolved under
TOPS-10 and
are theoretically separable from Unix, attempts to make them work on
other operating systems have been bedeviled by incompatibilities,
instabilities, and bugs. The theory and specifications are available
to anyone, but the engineering tradition to make them into a solid and
working reality exists only in the Unix world.[7]
The Internet technical culture and the Unix culture began to
merge in the early 1980s, and are now inseparably symbiotic. The
design of the World Wide Web, the modern face of the Internet, owes as
much to Unix as it does to the ancestral ARPANET. In particular, the
concept of the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) so central to the Web is
a generalization of the Unix idea of one uniform file namespace
everywhere. To function effectively as an Internet expert, an
understanding of Unix and its culture are indispensable.
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