The Philippine Online Chronicles

This is about Internet.

This is about Anarchy.

Previously on Lintech: Reflections on Openness (part 1) The mother of all demos

Anarchy’s mantra goes like this.

“We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.”

David Clark’s words would forever best describe one of core principles of the Internet Engineering Task Force, and in many ways how the Internet works. The Internet adopts standards, technologies, and sites through rough consensus. It has from the very beginning, as it does with everything from blogs to YouTube content.

Internet born

The hardware to make the Internet possible was available towards the end of the 1970s, as noted in part 1. It wasn’t until 1983 when the Internet officially began when TCP/IP became used by all hosts on ARPANET. The commercialization of the Internet would soon follow but would not take off until the 1990s.

The resilience of the Internet is that there is no central authority that governs it, nor a central technological infrastructure that governs it. The rule of thumb for Tier 1 network on the Internet goes like this: “A network that can reach every other network on the Internet without paying IP transit or paying settlements.”

In the Christmas of 1990, Tim Burners-Lee using NeXTcube, a high-end workstation built by Steve Jobs’ NeXT Computers, completed all the necessary tools for a working WorldWideWeb, marrying hypertext and the Internet. What came out that Christmas was the first web browser (which was the first web editor); the first web server and the first web pages came alive.

The birth of the Web, and the Internet moving from the realm of academics into the public sphere was an important building block to the significant change that transpired in the 1990s.

CERN, where Burners-Lee worked, by 1993 released the web’s source code for free.

Then in 1994, Netscape, an Internet services company was born. Its core business was to build and sell web browsers. The following year, on 1 March 1995, Yahoo and its web portal and search engine were born. It was quickly followed by the incorporation of Red Hat Software to address the system management problems of Linux.

It was also in 1995 that Apache group built their first free web server.

In August 1995, Netscape had an initial public offering. The stock opened at US$7 per share, and by December 1995, that stock would reach US$75 per share. It would be an all time high for the company.

In his book, Under the Radar, Robert Young, former CEO of Red Hat wrote that it was on December 7, 1995, when Microsoft announced that it was going to focus on the Internet that would be the beginning of the end for Netscape.

Free software

The commercialization of software, particularly the commercialization of Unix was the impetus that started the founding of the Free Software foundation.

Richard Stallman planted the seeds in 1985 with the founding of the Free Software Foundation and the encouragement of building small software tools that were free. It wouldn’t be until the 1990s that monumental change would happen.

The birth of Linux

It was 25 August 1991. It was the day, Linus Torvalds, then a Finnish student shot out a message to Usenet about the birth of Linux, an operating system kernel:

Hello everybody out there using minix -

I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).

I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-)

Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)

PS. Yes – it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(.

—Linus Torvalds

If a computer processor like your Pentium or Core 2 and i7s is like the human brain, then an operating system kernel such as Linux is like the autonomic functions and consciousness of a computer. That’s what Linux was and continues to be.

Soon developers flocked to Linux in doves.

Linus became the lead developer often described as a benevolent dictator and Linux became the poster child of the Open Source movement.

The mainstream

While all this was happening off stage and away from the public eye, in mainstream, the early 1990s saw the Rise of Microsoft as a dominant force when Windows 3.1 solidified market share. IBM’s sharp decline and rebirth and its subsequent pulling out of the operating system business followed the Rise of Microsoft.

The year 1996 saw Apple was in dire straits.

With Apple and IBM essentially out in the running, Microsoft became the Industry. The September 1992 issue of Byte Magazine, a highly influential computer magazine of the time had the cover--- “Is Unix dead?” Windows 3.1 was the de facto standard and it was cemented in 1995 with the launch of Windows 95.

1997

Looking back, 1997 was a turning point that would shape our digital future today.

In August of 1997, Steve Jobs returned to Apple. Bill Gates invested US$150M in Apple.

At Linux Kongres, Eric S. Raymond, delivered a paper, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” which described the contrast between commercial and open source development models.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

In response to the commercialization of software, the seeds for a transformation in the computer industry were planted five years earlier with the founding of the Free Software Foundation, but momentum really wouldn’t happen until the 1990s.

This was the turning point.

This was "Reflections on Openness part 2: In Anarchy We Trust."

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Internet Map, some rights reserved.

The First Web Server, some rights reserved.

The Story Behind Tux, some rights reserved.

xkcd.com: Open Source, some rights reserved.