Computer Systems Research Group

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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.

[edit] History

Professor Bob Fabry of Berkeley (University of California) acquired a UNIX-license from AT&T in 1974. Berkeley started to adjust UNIX and distributed their version of UNIX as BSD. In 1980 Professor Fabry signed a contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop UNIX even further to accommodate the specific requirements of the ARPAnet. With the funding of DARPA, Fabry created the Computer Systems Research Group. The TCP/IP protocol is one of the most noteworthy innovations of the group. But the Berkeley Software Distribution was also famous for the invention of the Berkeley Fast File System.

During the 1970s and 1980s, AT&T raised the licensing fee for UNIX to $100.000–$200.000. This became a big problem for small research labs and companies who used BSD and the CSRG set up a goal for themselves to replace all the source code that originated from AT&T. They succeeded in 1994, but AT&T didn't agree and took Berkeley to court. After the settlement in 1994, CSRG distributed its last versions, called 4.4BSD-Lite (BSD-licensed) and 4.4BSD-Encumbered (UNIX-licensed).

The group was disbanded in 1995, though not without leaving a legacy - OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD are all 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.

Together with the Free Software Foundation and Linux, the CSRG laid the foundations of the contemporary open source community.

Noted former members of the CSRG include Keith Bostic, Bill Joy and Marshall Kirk McKusick.