Keith Bostic | |
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Born | July 26, 1959 |
Employers | |
Known for | nvi and Berkeley DB |
Website | bostic |
Keith Bostic (born July 26, 1959) is an American software engineer and one of the key people in the history of Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix and open-source software.
In 1986, Bostic joined the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley. [1] He was one of the principal architects of the Berkeley 2BSD, 4.4BSD and 4.4BSD-Lite releases. [2] Among many other tasks, he led the effort at CSRG to create a free software version of BSD Unix, which helped allow the creation of FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.
Bostic was a founder of Berkeley Software Design Inc. (BSDi), [2] which produced BSD/OS, a proprietary version of BSD.
In 1993, the USENIX Association gave a Lifetime Achievement Award (Flame) to the Computer Systems Research Group, honoring 180 individuals, including Bostic, who contributed to the group's 4.4BSD-Lite release.
Bostic and his wife Margo Seltzer founded Sleepycat Software in 1996 to develop and commercialize Berkeley DB, an open-source, key-value database. Sleepycat Software was the first company to develop dual-licensed open-source software. In February 2006, the company was acquired by Oracle Corporation, [3] where Bostic worked until 2008.
Bostic and Michael Cahill founded WiredTiger in 2010 to create a NoSQL database management system. In November 2014, the company was acquired by MongoDB, which employed Bostic. [4]
Bostic is the author of nvi—a re-implementation of the classic text editor vi—and many other standard BSD and Linux utilities. He is a past member of the Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE, and several POSIX working groups, and a contributor to POSIX standards. [5]
Berkeley DB (BDB) is an embedded database software library for key/value data, historically significant in open-source software. Berkeley DB is written in C with API bindings for many other programming languages. BDB stores arbitrary key/data pairs as byte arrays and supports multiple data items for a single key. Berkeley DB is not a relational database, although it has database features including database transactions, multiversion concurrency control and write-ahead logging. BDB runs on a wide variety of operating systems, including most Unix-like and Windows systems, and real-time operating systems.
vi is a screen-oriented text editor originally created for the Unix operating system. The portable subset of the behavior of vi and programs based on it, and the ex editor language supported within these programs, is described by the Single Unix Specification and POSIX.
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.
Sleepycat Software, Inc. was the software company primarily responsible for maintaining the Berkeley DB packages from 1996 to 2006.
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 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."
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).
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.
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.
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, AT&T 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.
Margo Ilene Seltzer is a professor and researcher in computer systems. She is currently the Canada 150 Research Chair in Computer Systems and the Cheriton Family Chair in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. Previously, Seltzer was the Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and director at the Center for Research on Computation and Society.
Marshall Kirk McKusick is a computer scientist, known for his extensive work on BSD UNIX, from the 1980s to FreeBSD in the present day. He was president of the USENIX Association from 1990 to 1992 and again from 2002 to 2004, and still serves on the board. He is on the editorial board of ACM Queue Magazine. 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.
A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-like application is one that behaves like the corresponding Unix command or shell. Although there are general philosophies for Unix design, there is no technical standard defining the term, and opinions can differ about the degree to which a particular operating system or application is Unix-like.
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.
Michael J. (Mike) Karels was an American software engineer and one of the key figures in history of BSD UNIX. His face appears on the 7 of Spades on the USENIX 1994 Playing Card Deck.
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 begins in the 1970s.