ZFS: The Last Filesystem You’ll Ever Need, If Your RAM Holds Out
ZFS was designed at Sun by Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore beginning in 2001 and released in 2005 as a filesystem that simply refused to lose your data. Copy-on-write, end-to-end checksums, self-healing RAID, snapshots, clones, compression, deduplication — everything a storage administrator could want in a single coherent stack. It...
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Sun Microsystems: The Company That Invented the Modern Data Centre and Then Misplaced It
Sun Microsystems spent the 1980s and 1990s being almost preternaturally right about computing. Workstations on every desk. Networks as the computer. Java as a universal runtime. NFS for shared storage. The SPARC architecture. Open-source Solaris. Each prediction landed ahead of schedule and Sun reaped the rewards accordingly, becoming one of...
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The Curses Library: Terminal UIs Powered by Ancient VT100 Incantations
curses — the library for building text-based user interfaces — was written by Ken Arnold at Berkeley in 1980 to make the roguelike game rogue portable across terminals. It works by tracking what's on screen, computing the minimal sequence of terminal escape codes needed to update it, and emitting those...
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nice: The Command That Asks Your Process to Please Calm Down
Unix processes have a "niceness" value ranging from -20 (maximum priority, aggressive) to 19 (minimum priority, pathologically polite), which hints to the scheduler how much CPU time they should receive relative to others. Running a process with nice bumps its niceness up — making it yield to other processes —...
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/etc/hosts: The Original DNS, Still Lurking on Every Machine
Before DNS existed, host-to-IP mapping was maintained in a single flat file — HOSTS.TXT — distributed by the Stanford Research Institute and downloaded periodically by every machine on the ARPANET. By the early 1980s the network had grown large enough that this arrangement was obviously doomed, and Paul Mockapetris designed...
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The Heartbleed Bug: Two Years of Open-Heart Surgery on the Internet
In April 2014, a vulnerability in OpenSSL was disclosed that allowed any attacker to read 64 kilobytes of server memory at a time, repeatedly, without leaving a trace. The affected code was a missing bounds check in the heartbeat extension, added in 2011 by a PhD student who later said...
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