The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suite are the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), and the Internet Protocol (IP). Early versions of this networking model were known as the Department of Defense (DoD) model because the research and development were funded by the United States Department of Defense through DARPA.
Multics is an influential early time-sharing operating system based on the concept of a single-level memory. Nathan Gregory writes that Multics "has influenced all modern operating systems since, from microcomputers to mainframes."
TYPSET is an early document editor that was used with the 1964-released RUNOFF program, one of the earliest text formatting programs to see significant use.
roff is a typesetting markup language. As the first Unix text-formatting computer program, it is a predecessor of the nroff and troff document processing systems.
The Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) was the first general purpose time-sharing operating system. Compatible Time Sharing referred to time sharing which was compatible with batch processing; it could offer both time sharing and batch processing concurrently.
Fernando José "Corby" Corbató was an American computer scientist, notable as a pioneer in the development of time-sharing operating systems.
David Patrick Reed is an American computer scientist, educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known for a number of significant contributions to computer networking and wireless communications networks.
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Housed within the Ray and Maria Stata Center, CSAIL is the largest on-campus laboratory as measured by research scope and membership. It is part of the Schwarzman College of Computing but is also overseen by the MIT Vice President of Research.
Project Athena was a joint project of MIT, Digital Equipment Corporation, and IBM to produce a campus-wide distributed computing environment for educational use. It was launched in 1983, and research and development ran until June 30, 1991. As of 2023, Athena is still in production use at MIT. It works as software that makes a machine a thin client, that will download educational applications from the MIT servers on demand.
Stratus VOS is a proprietary operating system running on Stratus Technologies fault-tolerant computer systems. VOS is available on Stratus's ftServer and Continuum platforms. VOS customers use it to support high-volume transaction processing applications which require continuous availability. VOS is notable for being one of the few operating systems which run on fully lockstepped hardware.
The IBM RT PC is a family of workstation computers from IBM introduced in 1986. These were the first commercial computers from IBM that were based on a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture. The RT PC uses IBM's proprietary ROMP microprocessor, which commercialized technologies pioneered by IBM Research's 801 experimental minicomputer. The RT PC runs three operating systems: AIX, the Academic Operating System (AOS), and Pick.
FTP Software, Inc., was an American software company incorporated in 1986 by James van Bokkelen, John Romkey, Nancy Connor, Roxanne van Bokkelen, Dave Bridgham, and several other founding shareholders, who met at Toscanini's in Central Square after an email went out over the Bandykin mailing list looking for people interested in starting a company. Their main product was PC/TCP, a full-featured, standards-compliant TCP/IP package for DOS. The company was based in Andover, Massachusetts. It also had a number of offices throughout the United States and overseas.
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.
Michael Schroeder is an American computer scientist. His areas of research include computer security, distributed systems, and operating systems, and he is perhaps best known as the co-inventor of the Needham–Schroeder protocol. In 2001 he co-founded the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley lab and was the assistant managing director until the lab was disbanded in 2014.
Barry Appelman is recognized as being the father of the "buddy list" and AOL instant messenger. Companies had been using crude forms of Instant messaging within their own networks for over forty years, but the idea of presence, i.e. who is logged on at any given time, was non existent. It was not until Appelman, and his colleagues at the Thomas Watson Research Center, first began to write programs on the mainframe system letting each other know when they were actually online, that modern day Instant Messaging was born.
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.
PC/TCP Packet Driver is a networking API for MS-DOS, PC DOS, and later x86 DOS implementations such as DR-DOS, FreeDOS, etc. It implements the lowest levels of a TCP/IP stack, where the remainder is typically implemented either by terminate-and-stay-resident drivers or as a library linked into an application program. It was invented in 1983 at MIT's Lab for Computer Science, and was commercialized in 1986 by FTP Software.
Edson C. Hendricks, an IBM computer scientist, developed RSCS, fundamental software that powered the world’s largest network prior to the Internet and which directly influenced both Internet development and user acceptance of networking between independently managed organizations. Within IBM, the resulting network later became known as VNET and grew to 4000 nodes. In the academic community, VNET formed the base for BITNET which extended to 500 organizations and 3,000 nodes. VNET was also the networking design underpinning EARN in Europe, and NETNORTH in Canada.
John Romkey is an American computer scientist who along with Donald W. Gillies co-developed MIT PC/IP, the first TCP/IP stack in the industry for MS-DOS on the IBM PC in 1983 while at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1986, Romkey founded FTP Software, a commercial TCP/IP stack provider. Romkey authored the first network analyzer, Netwatch, predating the Network General Sniffer. He served on the IAB. With Simon Hackett, Romkey connected the first appliance to the Internet in 1990. Romkey is currently one of the owners of Blue Forest Research, a consulting company.
The Wollongong Group, Inc. (TWG), was one of the first companies to sell commercial software products based on the Unix operating system. It was founded to market a port of Unix Version 6 developed by researchers at the University of Wollongong, Australia. The company was active in Palo Alto, California from 1980 to 1995.
