The Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) was a research group at the University of California, Berkeley, that was dedicated to enhancing AT&T Unix operating system and funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) was a research group at the University of California, Berkeley, that was dedicated to enhancing AT&T Unix operating system and funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Professor Bob Fabry of Berkeley acquired a UNIX source license from AT&T in 1974. His group started to modify UNIX, and distributed their version as the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). In April 1980, Fabry signed a contract with DARPA to develop UNIX even further and accommodate the specific requirements of the ARPAnet. [1] With this funding, Fabry created the Computer Systems Research Group.
The Berkeley Sockets API and Berkeley Fast File System are some of the group's most significant innovations. The sockets interface solved the problem of supporting multiple protocols (e.g. XNS and TCP/IP), and extended UNIX's "everything is a file" notion to these network protocols, while the Fast File System increased the block allocation size from 512 bytes to 4096 bytes (or larger), improving disk transfer performance, while also allowing "micro-blocks" as small as 128 bytes, which improved disk use. Another noteworthy contribution was job control signals, which allowed a user to suspend a job with a key-press (control-Z), and then continue running the job in the background under the C shell.
Noteworthy versions of BSD were 3.0 BSD (the first version of BSD to support virtual memory), 4.0 BSD (which included the job-control CTRL-Z functionality, to suspend and restart a running job), a special 4.15 (interim) BSD version which had been released using BBN's TCP/IP, and 4.2 BSD (which included a full TCP/IP stack, FFS, and NFS support.)
By the early 1980s, CSRG was the best-known non-commercial Unix developer, and a majority of Unix sites used at least some Berkeley software. AT&T included some CSRG work in Unix System V. [2] During the 1970s and 1980s, AT&T/USL raised the commercial licensing fee for UNIX from $20,000 to $100,000–$200,000. This became a big problem for small research labs and companies who used BSD, and the CSRG decided to replace all the source code that originated from AT&T. They succeeded in 1994, but AT&T disagreed and sued Berkeley. After a court settlement in 1994, CSRG distributed the final version of BSD, called 4.4BSD-Lite2.
The group was disbanded in 1995, leaving a significant legacy: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonFly BSD are based on the 4.4BSD-Lite distribution and continue to play an important role in the open-source UNIX community today, including dictating the style of C programming used via KNF in the style man page.
Alongside the Free Software Foundation and Linux, the CSRG laid the foundations of the open source community.
Former members include Keith Bostic, Bill Joy, Marshall Kirk McKusick, Samuel J. Leffler, Özalp Babaoğlu and Michael J. Karels, among others. [3] The corporations Sun Microsystems, Berkeley Software Design and Sleepycat Software (later acquired by Oracle) can be considered spin-off companies of CSRG. Berkeley Software Design was led by Robert Kolstad, who led the development of BSD Unix for supercomputers at Convex Computer.
William Nelson Joy is an American computer engineer and venture capitalist. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as Chief Scientist and CTO at the company until 2003.
A Berkeley (BSD) socket is an application programming interface (API) for Internet domain sockets and Unix domain sockets, used for inter-process communication (IPC). It is commonly implemented as a library of linkable modules. It originated with the 4.2BSD Unix operating system, which was released in 1983.
The Unix file system (UFS) is a family of file systems supported by many Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It is a distant descendant of the original filesystem used by Version 7 Unix.
USL v. BSDi was a lawsuit brought in New Jersey federal court in 1992 by Unix System Laboratories against Berkeley Software Design, Inc and the Regents of the University of California over intellectual property related to the Unix operating system; a culmination of the Unix wars. The case was settled out of court in 1994 after the judge expressed doubt in the validity of USL's intellectual property, with Novell and the University agreeing not to litigate further over the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD).
The Berkeley r-commands are a suite of computer programs designed to enable users of one Unix system to log in or issue commands to another Unix computer via TCP/IP computer network. The r-commands were developed in 1982 by the Computer Systems Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley, based on an early implementation of TCP/IP.
nvi is a re-implementation of the classic Berkeley text editor, ex/vi, traditionally distributed with BSD and, later, Unix systems. It was originally distributed as part of the Fourth Berkeley Software Distribution (4BSD).
Keith Bostic is an American software engineer and one of the key people in the history of Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix and open-source software.
BSD/OS is a proprietary Unix-like operating system first released in 1993 as BSD/386. It was originally developed and sold by Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDi) and designed to be a Unix for 386-based PCs. It was built off the Net/2 distribution of BSD, on which the developers had previously contributed to.
Berkeley Software Design, Inc., was a software company founded in 1991 by members of the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG), known for developing and selling BSD/OS, a commercial and partially proprietary variant of the BSD Unix operating system for PCs.
UNIX/32V is an early version of the Unix operating system from Bell Laboratories, released in June 1979. 32V was a direct port of the Seventh Edition Unix to the DEC VAX architecture.
The history of Unix dates back to the mid-1960s, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bell Labs, and General Electric were jointly developing an experimental time-sharing operating system called Multics for the GE-645 mainframe. Multics introduced many innovations, but also had many problems. Bell Labs, frustrated by the size and complexity of Multics but not its aims, slowly pulled out of the project. Their last researchers to leave Multics – among them Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna – decided to redo the work, but on a much smaller scale.
A network socket is a software structure within a network node of a computer network that serves as an endpoint for sending and receiving data across the network. The structure and properties of a socket are defined by an application programming interface (API) for the networking architecture. Sockets are created only during the lifetime of a process of an application running in the node.
Bob Fabry founded the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) in the EECS Department at the University of California, Berkeley in 1979. The BSD software developed at CSRG helped spawn the Open Source movement and facilitated the explosion of the internet. The success of the BSD programming environment led to a number of Unix-like systems which replaced the portions of the BSD code that were subject to AT&T copyright. The Linux system is perhaps the most well-known of these and about half of the utilities that it comes packaged with are drawn from the BSD distribution.
Özalp Babaoğlu, is a Turkish computer scientist. He is currently professor of computer science at the University of Bologna, Italy. He received a Ph.D. in 1981 from the University of California at Berkeley. He is the recipient of 1982 Sakrison Memorial Award, 1989 UNIX InternationalRecognition Award and 1993 USENIX AssociationLifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the UNIX system community and to Open Industry Standards. Before moving to Bologna in 1988, Babaoğlu was an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. He has participated in several European research projects in distributed computing and complex systems. Babaoğlu is an ACM Fellow and has served as a resident fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Bologna and on the editorial boards for ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems and Springer-Verlag Distributed Computing.
Marshall Kirk McKusick is an American computer scientist, known for his extensive work on BSD UNIX, from the 1980s to FreeBSD in the present day. He served on the board of the USENIX Association from 1986 to 1992 and again from 2000 to 2006, including terms as president from 1990 to 1992 and 2000 to 2002. He served on the editorial board of ACM Queue Magazine from 2002 to 2019. He served on the board of the FreeBSD Foundation from 2012 to 2022. He is known to friends and colleagues as "Kirk".
The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), also known as Berkeley Unix or BSD Unix, is a discontinued Unix operating system developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, beginning in 1978. It began as an improved derivative of AT&T's original Unix that was developed at Bell Labs, based on the source code but over time diverging into its own code. BSD would become a pioneer in the advancement of Unix and computing.
Unix is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others. Initially intended for use inside the Bell System, AT&T licensed Unix to outside parties in the late 1970s, leading to a variety of both academic and commercial Unix variants from vendors including University of California, Berkeley (BSD), Microsoft (Xenix), Sun Microsystems (SunOS/Solaris), HP/HPE (HP-UX), and IBM (AIX).
Michael J. Karels was an American software engineer and one of the key figures in history of BSD UNIX.
NextBSD was an operating system initially based on the trunk version of FreeBSD as of August 2015. It was a fork of FreeBSD which implemented new features developed on branches, but not yet implemented in FreeBSD. As of 2019, the website is defunct, with the last commits on GitHub dating to October 2019. The Wayback Machine captures of the website after December 15, 2017 are domain squatter pages, and as of March 17, 2021, the site is redirects to a fake "Apple Support" page.
The history of the Berkeley Software Distribution began in the 1970s when University of California, Berkeley received a copy of Unix. Professors and students at the university began adding software to the operating system and released it as BSD to select universities. Since it contained proprietary Unix code, it originally had to be distributed subject to AT&T licenses. The bundled software from AT&T was then rewritten and released as free software under the BSD license. However, this resulted in a lawsuit with Unix System Laboratories, the AT&T subsidiary responsible for Unix. Eventually, in the 1990s, the final versions of BSD were publicly released without any proprietary licenses, which led to many descendants of the operating system that are still maintained today.
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