Berknet

The Berkeley Network, or Berknet, was an early local area network, developed at the University of California, Berkeley ca. 1979, primarily by Eric Schmidt as part of his master's thesis work.[1][2] The network continuously connected about a dozen computers running Unix,[3] provided email, file transfer, printing and remote command execution services to its users, and it connected the two other major networks in use at the time, the ARPANET and UUCPNET.[4]

The network operated using what were then high-speed serial links; its software implementation shipped with the Berkeley Software Distribution from version 2.0 onwards.[2] It consisted of a line discipline within the Unix kernel,[5] a set of daemons that managed queues of commands to be sent across machines, and a set of user-level programs that enqueued the actual commands.[1] The Berkeley Network introduced the .netrc file;[1] Horton noted in 1984 that "Berknets are gone now",[6] but support for Berknet's custom email addressing scheme was provided in the Sendmail program until 1993.[5]

References

  1. 1 2 3 Schmidt, Eric (1983) [1979]. "The Berkeley Network − A Retrospective". UNIX Programmer's Manual, 4.2 Berkeley Software Distribution, Volume 2c.
  2. 1 2 Shacklette, Mark (2004). "Unix Operating System". The Internet Encyclopedia. Wiley. p. 497. ISBN 9780471222019.
  3. ↑ Lerner, Josh; Tirole, Jean (2002). "Some simple economics of open source". J. Industrial Economics L (2). CiteSeerX: 10.1.1.461.3373.
  4. ↑ Hauben, Michael; Hauben, Ronda (1997). Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet. p. 170. ISBN 978-0-8186-7706-9.
  5. 1 2 Vixie, Paul A.; Avolio, Frederick M. (2002). Sendmail: Theory and Practice. Elsevier. p. 3. ISBN 9781555582296.
  6. ↑ Horton, Mark R. (1986). What is a Domain?. Software Tools Users Group [Sof84]. pp. 368–372.
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