Eric Paul Allman | |
|---|---|
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| Born | September 2, 1955 El Cerrito, California, U.S. |
| Education | University of California, Berkeley (BS, MS) |
| Occupation | Programmer |
| Employer | Sendmail |
| Known for | Sendmail |
| Title | Chief Science Officer |
| Spouse | Marshall Kirk McKusick |
Eric Paul Allman (born September 2, 1955) is an American computer programmer who developed sendmail and its precursor delivermail in the late 1970s and early 1980s at UC Berkeley. In 1998, Allman and Greg Olson co-founded the company Sendmail, Inc. [1]
Born in El Cerrito, California, Allman knew from an early age that he wanted to work in computing, He used to break into his high school's mainframe and later used the UC Berkeley computing center for his computing needs. In 1973, he entered UC Berkeley, just as the Unix operating system began to become popular in academic circles. [2] He earned B.S. and M.S. degrees from UC Berkeley in 1977 and 1980 respectively.
As the Unix source code was available at Berkeley, the local hackers quickly made many extensions to the AT&T code. One such extension was delivermail , which in 1981 turned into sendmail . As an MTA, it was designed to deliver email over the still relatively small (as compared to today's Internet) ARPANET, which consisted of many smaller networks with vastly differing formats for e-mail headers.
Sendmail soon became an important part of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) and it used to be the most widely used MTA on Unix based systems, despite its somewhat complex configuration syntax and frequent abuse by Internet telemarketing firms. In 1998, Allman and Greg Olson founded Sendmail, Inc., headquartered in Emeryville, California, to do proprietary work on improving sendmail.
The logging format used by the MTA, known as syslog, was at first used solely by sendmail, but eventually became an unofficial standard format used by other unrelated programs for logging. Later, this format was made official by RFC 3164 in 2001; however, the original format has been made obsolete by the most recent revision, RFC 5424.
Allman is credited with popularizing the Allman indent style, also known as BSD indent style. [3] He ported a Fortran version of Super Star Trek to the C programming language, which later became BSD Trek, and is still included in various Linux distributions as part of the classic bsdgames package. [4]
He was awarded the Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in August, 2006 in Telluride, Colorado. In 2009 he was recognized as a Distinguished Engineer by the Association for Computing Machinery. [5] In April 2014 he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame. [6]
Allman, who is gay, lives in Berkeley, California, with Marshall Kirk McKusick, who had been his partner for more than 30 years before they got married in October 2013. [7] The two first met in graduate school. McKusick is a lead developer of BSD. [8]
There is some sort of perverse pleasure in knowing that it's basically impossible to send a piece of hate mail through the Internet without its being touched by a gay program. That's kind of funny. [9]
— Eric Allman
The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients typically use SMTP only for sending messages to a mail server for relaying, and typically submit outgoing email to the mail server on port 587 or 465 per RFC 8314. For retrieving messages, IMAP is standard, but proprietary servers also often implement proprietary protocols, e.g., Exchange ActiveSync.
Sendmail is a general purpose internetwork email routing facility that supports many kinds of mail-transfer and delivery methods, including the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) used for email transport over the Internet.
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.
The BSD Daemon, nicknamed Beastie, is the generic mascot of BSD operating systems. The BSD Daemon is named after software daemons, a class of long-running computer programs in Unix-like operating systems—which, through a play on words, takes the cartoon shape of a demon. The BSD Daemon's nickname Beastie is a slurred phonetic pronunciation of BSD. Beastie customarily carries a trident to symbolize a software daemon's forking of processes. The FreeBSD web site has noted Evi Nemeth's 1988 remarks about cultural-historical daemons in the Unix System Administration Handbook: "The ancient Greeks' concept of a 'personal daemon' was similar to the modern concept of a 'guardian angel' ... As a rule, UNIX systems seem to be infested with both daemons and demons."
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 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
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 discontinued proprietary version of the BSD operating system developed by Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDi).
Berkeley Software Design, Inc., was a corporation which developed, sold licenses for, and supported BSD/OS, a commercial and partially proprietary variant of the BSD Unix operating system for PC compatible computer systems. The name was chosen for its similarity to "Berkeley Software Distribution" the source of its primary product.
In computing, syslog is a standard for message logging. It allows separation of the software that generates messages, the system that stores them, and the software that reports and analyzes them. Each message is labeled with a facility code, indicating the type of system generating the message, and is assigned a severity level.
Evans Hall is the statistics, economics, and mathematics building on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley.
In BSD-derived computer operating systems and in related operating systems such as SunOS, a disklabel is a record stored on a data storage device such as a hard disk that contains information about the location of the partitions on the disk. Disklabels were introduced in the 4.3BSD-Tahoe release. Disklabels are usually edited using the disklabel utility. In later versions of FreeBSD, this was renamed as bsdlabel.
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 or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley. The term "BSD" commonly refers to its open-source descendants, including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonFly BSD.
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.
In Unix and operating systems inspired by it, the file system is considered a central component of the operating system. It was also one of the first parts of the system to be designed and implemented by Ken Thompson in the first experimental version of Unix, dated 1969.
Michael J. Karels was an American software engineer and one of the key figures in history of BSD UNIX.
The history of the Berkeley Software Distribution begins in the 1970s.
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