Re: [Paddlewise] Nobel Prize Winners Appropriate to Paddlers and This Forum

On Tue, Oct 06, 2009 at 04:36:39PM -0700, Craig Jungers wrote:
> Oops... my iphone is ringing. Did I mention that the iphone (and all the
> modern Mac computers) runs a version of Unix as its operating system? I
> wonder where the editors of Byte Magazine are now. Using a Blackberry, no
> doubt.

<engage arrogant Unix wizard mode at: 50%>

Having used Unix for 32 years now (and its little brother, Linux, for
about half as long), I'm well-accustomed to the periodic pronouncements
of its doom from the lesser minds inhabiting places like Byte and Datamation.
It never quite seems to dawn on such people (if I might dignify these
poorly-evolved simians with the term "people") that they've been more
wrong every single time they've made the prediction.  (I wonder how many
of them realize that the little SOHO router on their desk is probably
running Unix and that their PVR is probably running Linux?)

It is not even a slight exaggeration to say that the Internet that
everyone on this mailing list knows was just about entirely built
on Unix.  For example:

	- For a couple of decades, almost all the mail servers on the
	Internet ran sendmail on various flavors of Unix.  Now sendmail
	has competition: postfix, exim, and courier, to name a few.
	Oh -- they run on Unix too.

	- The best programs and most widely-used programs for managing
	mailing lists -- majordomo, and now Mailman -- were designed
	and built on Unix.

	- The Apache web server which thoroughly dominates the landscape?
	(And understandably so, as it's the best available by a huge
	margin.)  Designed and developed on Unix.

	- So was the HTTP protocol, which is how your browser asks for
	web pages and web servers send them back.

	- Oh, by the way: so was the web browser.  The first one was
	built on Unix, and best available one (Firefox) is still primarily
	developed on Unix and Linux.

	- And all those fancy features on the web sites you visit?
	Largely built with scripting languages like perl, PHP, and Python.
	And yes, that's right: all built on Unix.

	- Which brings us to the database backends behind those web sites:
	they're mostly MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Berkeley DB.  Same drill.

(This is why the acronym LAMP exists: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/perl/Python.
There are millions of web sites using this software stack.)

	- All of Usenet (which latecomers to the 'net probably aren't aware
	of, but is 30 years old and is the largest distributed discussion
	system ever built, dwarfing mere insignificant and transient newbies
	like Facebook) from the NNTP protocol to the INN server,
	is built on Unix.

	- And of course, if it weren't for BIND, the reference-standard
	DNS server, you'd be typing http://1.2.3.4 into your web browser
	instead of http://www.example.com.  BIND is a category-killer: it's
	so solid that almost nobody runs anything else, and many of the
	people running it in embedded software products don't even know
	they are...because it *just works*.

	- Java.  Did I mention Java?  Right.

	- And oh by the way: all the significant work done on TCP/IP for
	the last twenty-five years.  TCP/IP (along with UDP) is what
	moves most of the bits around around the 'net.	It's not just
	critical infrastructure, it *is* the Internet.

It's worth noting that NO significant Internet technology that's shown
up in the last thirty years has been developed on any other platform.
None.  That's not an accident.

Which brings us back to Bell Labs, and Ken Thompson, and Dennis Ritchie,
and Brian Kernighan, and all the other brilliant minds who hatched Unix
and enabled the Internet to take huge leaps forward.  It was truly a
unique place, and it's a pity that there's nothing comparable to it
any more -- we're all poorer for that loss.

Credits:

Nod to:

	Information Wants to be Valuable
	http://www.netaction.org/articles/freesoft.html

whose main points I've appropriated, and and pointer to:
	
	Reflections on Trusting Trust
	http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

which is Ken Thompson's tour-de-force Turing Award lecture from 1984,
and absolutely mandatory reading for anyone who even wants to pretend
to have a few rudimentary clues about IT security.

Point of order: Yes, there are primitive, incompetently-built web sites
and mail servers that run on Windows and serve content via IIS and have
MS-SQL backends and run Exchange and so on.  These divide neatly into
two categories: those that have already been compromised, and those that
are going to be compromised.  There are no exceptions.  Not even Microsoft
has managed to run these securely, as we see by the long and ongoing
history of major security incidents involving their products, including
a particularly embarrassing one just this week at Hotmail.

<disengage arrogant Unix wizard mode>

---Rsk
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