The Bell System Technical Journal, 1978: The Issue That Launched a Thousand Careers
In July–August 1978, Bell Labs dedicated an entire double issue of the Bell System Technical Journal to Unix. It contained papers on the operating system, the C language, the shell, tools, and the philosophy underlying all of them. The journal was not widely circulated outside Bell Labs and academia, but...
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TCP/IP: Cerf and Kahn’s Napkin Sketch That Became the Internet’s Skeleton
In 1973, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn sketched out the Transmission Control Protocol in a hotel lobby, attempting to solve the problem of connecting incompatible networks without requiring any of them to change. The insight was to make the endpoints — not the network — responsible for reliability: the network...
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Git: Linus Torvalds Built a Version Control System in Ten Days Out of Spite
In April 2005, BitKeeper — the proprietary version control system the Linux kernel had been using — revoked its free licence for open-source projects following a dispute. Linus Torvalds, unimpressed with the available alternatives, spent ten days writing his own. The design goals were: fast, distributed, and proof against data...
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The Therac-25: When a Race Condition Became a Murder Weapon
Between 1985 and 1987, a radiation therapy machine called the Therac-25 administered lethal radiation doses to at least six patients, killing several. The cause was a collection of software bugs in its control system — including a race condition in the user interface that, under specific timing conditions, allowed the...
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eBPF: The Linux Kernel’s Accidental Extension Language
eBPF — Extended Berkeley Packet Filter — began in 1992 as a compact virtual machine for filtering network packets in the kernel without the overhead of copying data to userspace. Alexei Starovoitov and Daniel Borkmann expanded it dramatically in 2014 into a general-purpose, sandboxed, JIT-compiled virtual machine that can run...
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DTrace: The Debugging Superpower That Took a Decade to Reach Linux
Bryan Cantrill and colleagues at Sun created DTrace in 2003: a dynamic tracing framework that could instrument a live production system — kernel and userspace simultaneously — with zero overhead when probes weren't firing, and minimal overhead when they were. You could ask a running system arbitrary questions about its...
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