20 Network Changing Products

An anonymous reader wrote to mention a Network World piece about products that have changed networking over the last twenty years. From the article: "SendMail 1998 - Sendmail was key to the e-mail revolution because it was how everyone got up and running with e-mail communications over the Internet. Eric Allman wrote the original version of this open source mail-transfer agent while he was at the University of California at Berkeley in 1979. He stopped development on it in 1982, however, and didn't revisit it until 1990. In 1998 he founded SendMail to sell the software's first commercial version, the SendMail switch."

Comments

Ugh

[Reality Master 101]

Sendmail was key to the e-mail revolution because it was how everyone got up and running with e-mail communications over the Internet.

And Sendmail also happens to be one of the absolute worst widely-deployed programs in the history computer software. Man, I despite that program. How could anyone have thought that configuration file format was a good idea? You know it's bad when you have to have a preprocessor to translate something (semi-)tolerable into its syntax.

The e-mail revolution succeeded DESPITE sendmail, not because of it, though I give it some small credit for flexibility. It was just barely adequate enough to keep people from writing a replacement (thought we have some now).

No point to this post, except to voice how much I despise sendmail. :)

Re:Ugh

[misleb]

I think the Sendmail cf file made more sense back when computers were slower. It is easier for a computer to parse for routing. At least that's how someone once explained it to me. I honestly don't know how it remained dominant as long as it did. I ditched Sendmail the day I tried Postfix.

-matthew

Re:Ugh

[lakeland]

You have to think back to when sendmail was written.

There are many different protocols that it supported which are simply not used now. Sure, you can write a SMTP server in fewer lines of code, but I doubt you'd be able to write something that could handle all of the crazy protocols in use at the time (and was flexible enough to be modified for protocols not invented yet).

Re:Ugh

[Kenrod]

I love sendmail. It's the reason I became an application engineer instead of a sysadmin.

Re:Ugh

[misleb]

So you could write a better mail system?

-matthew

Re:Ugh

[timeOday]

I think the Sendmail cf file made more sense back when computers were slower. It is easier for a computer to parse for routing.

Sure, but isn't the cf file only used at load time? It would be crazy to parse the cf file for every email, and equally crazy to impose that syntax on users for a file read only at startup time.

Re:Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

>And Sendmail also happens to be one of the absolute worst widely-deployed programs in the history computer software

I would argue that BIND is worse....Than again, I might not.
Sendwale and Bind must die. die. die. die.

Re:Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

MMDF was around at the time, was more flexible, and you could write new channels to handle any new protocol you could imagine.

It suffered from not being bundled and requiring you to exercise a license agreement.

Even in those days sendmail had a poor reputation for security. We deployed MMDF and felt pretty smug when the Robert Morris worm turned up a few years later.

Re:Ugh

[schon]

isn't the cf file only used at load time?

The .cf file is used whenever the sendmail binary is run - on some systems this meant whenever a local user sends email.

As another poster pointed out, Sendmail is more than just a SMTP daemon.

Re:Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

I was going to say the same thing, but sendmail is probably worse when you think about it. I mean BIND comes with a lot of servers, but just about EVERY server used to come with sendmail installed, and usally enabled, AND usually listening to outside traffic. Even if you weren't going to send mail out you probably needed it for information about cron jobs. Then it was just a matter of getting some arbitrary command executed on the machine to take over the whole thing. (Think unsecured cgi script).

So yeah, sendmail probably was worse. Although by todays tokens it is easily replaced with better alternatives. BIND unfortunatly survives with a few other servers like djbdns securing the fringes of the internet.

Re:Ugh

[thogard]

The sendmail config has been considered a binary, machine readable only file for those that know sendmail since the introduction of the m4 preprocessor. Its a binary file that you can use a text editor on if you have a real need.

I've messed with over 100 email packages in my life and I still use sendmail. Its sill flexible, and you can still add stuff to it for experiments and they still fix bugs no matter how obscure and unlikely they are. Like the recent one which effects nearly every unix bit of code that uses alarm, signal and setjmp.

You don't have any idea what bad is until you look at any one of the many X.400 email packages.

Re:Ugh

[sukotto]

I find it funny that many of the people posting in defense of SendMail here are the same ones that lambast MS Windows for the very same "features".

- Huge, bloated software.
- Hard to configure.
- Hard to maintain.
- Has a history of enabling spam and virus propagation (due to users inability to set it up properly).
- Yet it dominates the market despite all other alternatives.

Obviously if you're discussing Windows it's BAD!. If it's sendmail, well, it's GOOD!.

Even more funny is that I do it too. :-(

Re:Ugh

[dougmc]

I think the Sendmail cf file made more sense back when computers were slower.

No, sendmail's complexity/flexibility made sense because there were oodles of very different mail protocols. Now, almost everything can be sent from point A to B via SMTP, but back then there were lots of different options, and the options were needed to make it all work. (Granted, the options are still available now, but few people use them anymore.)

And really, it's not that bad once you get used to it.

And besides, it was one of the first MTAs out there -- and yet it still exists today. Other MTAs have come and gone, many even using what's been learned from sendmail, but sendmail still exists and still routes a large percentage of all e-mail today.

Re:Ugh

[dougmc]

- Has a history of enabling spam and virus propagation (due to users inability to set it up properly).

I've found sendmail to be as spam-resistant as any of the other MTAs out there at the same time.

At one point, every mail server was an open relay, because that's just the way things were done, and few people abused it and it was nice. Then the spammers came and ruined that. Sendmail changed to default to `don't relay' approximately as fast as everybody else. From time to time spammers have found ways around the anti-relay provisions, but this has happened with other MTAs.

As for virii, I'd argue that if a program sends an email from sytem A to user B, it's the MTA's job to, by default, deliver the email if it's properly addressed and such. Virus scanning can be added it you want, but it certainly shouldn't be there by default.

If it's sendmail, well, it's GOOD!

I don't think people quite think this. But it runs on *nix, so it can't be all bad.

Re:Ugh

[HaydnH]

Haven't you ever used the mail function of php on linux/unix? That still uses sendmail. Infact I still use sendmail in shell scripts all the time. Considering how old sendmail is and the fact that people, even those as big as php, still use it I don't think the statement that the e-mail revolution happened despite it is fair - just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's bad.

Re:Ugh

[uglyduckling]

Um... no! Many Linux distributions don't use sendmail as their default MTA, but practically every Linux - and I think most other Unices too - will have a sendmail compatibility wrapper which implements the functionality of sendmail as required by php, cgi, shellscripts etc. So when you type 'sendmail' at the command line or use it from a script you're not using the Sendmail package but a compatibility layer for whatever MTA you have installed which happens to emulate Sendmail since it's a fairly universal standard.

Re:Ugh

[HaydnH]

Errr... okkkk... you must be a debian user (which uses exim) - as an example the following use sendmail as their default MTA:

Solaris
HP-UX
RedHat
Suse
Slackware

Re:Ugh

[swillden]

The top 10 Linux distros, according to DistroWatch.com, and their default mail servers are:

• Ubuntu: Postfix
• Mandriva: Postfix
• SUSE: Postfix (you said sendmail, but I just checked my SUSE test systems and they have postfix).
• Fedora/Red Hat: Sendmail
• Debian: Exim
• Knoppix: Exim
• MEPIS: Exim
• Gentoo: No real default, but the Handbook seems to recommend Postfix
• Slackware: Sendmail
• Xandros: Postfix

So the score is eight non-sendmail to two sendmail. Three if you count Fedora and Red Hat separately, which seems reasonable since Ubuntu, Debian, Knoppix and MEPIS are counted separately (Red Hat doesn't show up in the distrowatch top ten list, which seems strange). A better way to look at it, of course, is by market share, but decent market share figures are nearly impossible to obtain.

It appears to me that however you count it, the GP is right in saying that most Linux distributions/installations do not use sendmail by default. They all have a /usr/bin/sendmail utility, of course, but that doesn't mean they use the sendmail package.

Of the major Unixes, it appears that Solaris, HP-UX, IRIX, and the BSDs use sendmail, but AIX and OS X Server use Postfix, so sendmail appears to be the winner there.

Re:Ugh

[kindbud]

Single letter tokens for command names and rulesets are a legacy of times when memory was expensive. You'll note that since memory has become cheap, sendmail supports human-readable names for commands and rulesets. And there is nothing wrong with using a pre-processor. Most every language uses one, most have several different types for different kinds of jobs. Ever heard of rpcgen? Makefile.pl? Even syslog uses m4 to pre-process its conf file (at least it does on SYSV).

No point to this post, except to voice how much I despise sendmail. :)

Can't argue with that.

I'll give them the rest of it, but Skype!?

[grasshoppa]

From TFA:
Skype
2003

This proprietary peer-to-peer telephony application provided the first real quality VoIP product (did we mention it's free here?) that has built a cult following and spurred industry questions about why corporations can't move to convergence more quickly. Skype picked up both business clout and deep pockets when eBay bought the company in the fall of 2005

Hello? Asterisk anybody?

Open source? Check
Open standards? Check ( note: skype is not open in this regard )
Quality product? Check check check
Huge business impact? Check

Not to mention asterisk isn't burdened with weird restrictions fueled by marketing concerns. Digium is the company behind it, and they do make hardware that works with it, but it's hardly locked down to *that* specific hardware.

Re:I'll give them the rest of it, but Skype!?

[datafr0g]

Yes but Asterisk isn't nearly as popular as Skype, therefore Skype wins when it comes to influencing networks.

Re:I'll give them the rest of it, but Skype!?

[Bizzeh]

why is open source high on your list of what makes something good? open or closed, a product can still be better than something else...

Re:I'll give them the rest of it, but Skype!?

[_vSyncBomb]

Sorry, but you are dead wrong. You may be right about the first three points, but your wrongness on the last point wins. Asterisk had no "huge business impact," or even a noticeable one. Asterisk changed the world about 0.1% as much as Skype did.

Despite their crap architecture (which is mostly secret, but you can tell it's crap by how much of your CPU it uses when idle in the background, using your computer to help strangers have phone sex), its crap UI (compared to [insert competitor here]), and its crap sound quality, Skype has touched more lives than ALL OTHER COMPETITORS COMBINED.

Now, I see this changing as the market adjusts; their share is plummeting now, as one might expect.

Nevertheless, Skype has introduced more people to cheap Internet phone calls that work (at least minimally) than any and all of the other more P.C. (open source, not founded by spyware software pirates, whatever) solutions that one could name here.

Sorry if you don't like these facts, though... do you work for Digium by any chance?

Re:I'll give them the rest of it, but Skype!?

[LennyDotCom]

why is open source high on your list of what makes something good?

because you have accesse to the source and can chabge what ever you want if you have the abilitity.... Duh

Re:I'll give them the rest of it, but Skype!?

[grasshoppa]

Sorry if you don't like these facts, though... do you work for Digium by any chance?

No, I'm a voip contractor ( among other things ). I have an install base of about 20 businesses. Figure about 50 or so people at each business, so I'm responsible for about 1000 people using VoIP with *. And I'm relatively new to this.

I agree that skype has made more headlines. But for serious work, those that know use *.

Re:I'll give them the rest of it, but Skype!?

[retro128]

Open source? Check
Open standards? Check ( note: skype is not open in this regard )
Quality product? Check check check
Huge business impact? Check

Market penetration? Ease of use?

Skype is VOIP that any Joe can install for free, and has widespread useage.

Asterisk, on the other hand, is a royal headache to install, configure and maintain. The VoIP phones I've seen that are supposed to work with it are generally pretty clunky and not very resilient. And unless something has changed since I last looked at it, there is no graphical management tool that comes with it, and instead requires you to download a separate one that is either free or commerical. The consequences of this are that that no two Asterisk installations will likely be anything alike, greatly complicating maintenance and overall adaptation. Having said that, if I rolled it out for my company and left, who would my company be able to call to make changes or otherwise maintain it?

Simply put, something like Asterisk just can't get traction unless there's some type of standard applied to it. If Digium started selling plug-n-play boxes that could be mounted to a plywood backing and had a standardized GUI interface along with phones that can take a beating, I'd definitely take a serious look at it.

Re:I'll give them the rest of it, but Skype!?

[BoldAndBusted]

OK, here goes. In one model, I have to trust you that what you say is true. In the other, I can see for myself. I like seeing for myself.

Re:I'll give them the rest of it, but Skype!?

[kimvette]

1. Consistency, a working out-of-the-box configuration? Check out asterisk@home

2. No GUI by default? Are you saying that traditional PBX systems DO?

3. Ease of use: It's easier to parse a couple of .conf files (or install AMP and use that) than to memorize and navigate voice or beep menu prompts

4. Who can maintain it? Anyone who can RTFM, read English, and navigate vi, pico, or nano -- or a web browser if AMP is installed

5. re: The consequences of this are that that no two Asterisk installations will likely be anything alike,

This is NOT a weakness. I don't have an Avaya, Nortel, Panasonic, or (other proprietary PBX) 8-line or 4-line or 24-line system that needs to be thrown away and replaced by a new system when the need for more lines arises. Just add another FXO card or two, or at worst, another asterisk box and link them together.

Need more voicemail? Run an ambulance service and need to record all calls, and ran out of storage? No need to throw away a perfectly good voicemail module and replace it with a more expensive one - just add another hard drive.

No two configurations being exactly alike is NOT a weakness when it comes to PBX. The whole POINT of asterisk is its (theoretically) unlimited flexibility and expandability.

Re:I'll give them the rest of it, but Skype!?

[Cheapy]

And if you don't have the ability / time to change the program and make it run smoothly?

Re:I'll give them the rest of it, but Skype!?

[colenski]

Asterisk *will* be part of the next list guaranteed. It's just hasn't had press aknowledgement except for a couple of Business Week articles. It's too early to pronounce it as changing the telephony landscape, because it is currently in the process of doing so.

It's only been, what, 18 months since 1.0.9 was released, the first "ready for prime time" version?

Everytime I see someone mention Asterisk on /. there are responses like "wtf is this" so here is what the big deal is about I read that as some 5 million odd hits

And as to how this is different than Skype, well, essentially, you can plug it into anything. Asterisk interoperates with 15 of 20 items on TFA's list. (skype support is being worked on I hear as is the GoogleTalk protocol) And that leads to uber cool shit like this being possible

Re:I'll give them the rest of it, but Skype!?

[colenski]

>No two configurations being exactly alike is NOT a weakness when it comes to >PBX. The whole POINT of asterisk is its (theoretically) unlimited flexibility >and expandability.

s/g/asterisk/sendmail

Same diff. And this is why a lot of PBX guys and Asterisk critics have a hard time wrapping their heads around. They are thinking in terms like this *is* a box that is desirable to mount on the plywood backboard next to the bix block in the telephone room, but it isn't really. You *can* buy a configuration like this in a Sokeris or mini-AT or what have you, but it's most comfortable on the server rack, doing things that most other IP PBX'es aspire to.

I admit, this is not a Joe Sixpack product. But, neither is Sendmail.

Re:I'll give them the rest of it, but Skype!?

[Trogre]

Then I can hire someone else to do it for me.

Any capable programmer. Not some business rep. No NDA's to sign.

Re:I'll give them the rest of it, but Skype!?

[bit01]

why is open source high on your list of what makes something good?

Though commercially funded astroturfers like to lie about this, the type of license is a very important part of the featureset of a program. To pretend otherwise is naive.

Some people regard this feature as important, others less so.

open or closed, a product can still be better than something else...

You need to improve your reading comprehension skills. Just because the license is an important feature of a program doesn't make it the only feature. At no point did the post claim the open source license was the only feature, just an important one.

---

Beware deceptive astroturfers.

Re:I'll give them the rest of it, but Skype!?

[ColaMan]

Open source? Check
Open standards? Check ( note: skype is not open in this regard )
Quality product? Check check check
Huge business impact? Check

Easy to use windows GUI? BZZZZZZZT.

Sorry. Asterisk fails to pass muster.

Re:I'll give them the rest of it, but Skype!?

[replicant108]

why is open source high on your list of what makes something good?

Some reasons why people like open source (aka Free Software):

- Lack of vendor lock-in
- Enhanced customisability
- Enhanced scalability
- Reduced licensing costs

Re:I'll give them the rest of it, but Skype!?

[capecodcarl]

OK, here goes. In one model, I have to trust you that what you say is true. In the other, I can see for myself. I like seeing for myself.

Case in point: Peer-to-peer programs and the proliferation of spyware. Many many users will just download and install a popular peer-to-peer application without any realization that they're infecting their machine with difficult to remove trojans that clog up their system. When's the last time you used a popular open source product that had intentional trojan horses in it? Somebody would just patch it and rerelease it under another name and the original project would die. That's not so easy to do with proprietary closed-source applications (although they tried it with Kazaa Lite for instance).

Re:I'll give them the rest of it, but Skype!?

[grasshoppa]

Easy to use windows GUI? BZZZZZZZT.

Sorry. Asterisk fails to pass muster.

And yet, when you tell a CEO that he/she can pay 100g for a proprietary phone system with on-reusable phones, or 15g for an open system where the phones and equipment can be reused AND will have more flexibility and features, guess which they choose?

In fact, in my dealings, I've found the price to be too low at times, and have had to artificially inflate it, which I hate doing. CEOs just don't trust something that cheap. I typically up my charges per hour, which they are well aware of. It makes the final number higher, and they are more comfortable with it.

Skype may make it easy for the home user, but that's not where the money and influence is.

Re:I'll give them the rest of it, but Skype!?

[retro128]

1. Consistency, a working out-of-the-box configuration? Check out asterisk@home

I'm looking at it...Still have yet to play with it. Not sure yet if I could get away with running a company on it though.

2. No GUI by default? Are you saying that traditional PBX systems DO?

No, but that's apples and oranges. The traditional PBX is based on a legacy paradigm whose time is drawing to a close. We're talking about VoIP, which by definition has got an Ethernet run to a switch at one point or another. Is it too much to ask that such a system has some sort of graphical management interface? My BCM as a GUI, as does Cisco Call Manager.

3. Ease of use: It's easier to parse a couple of .conf files (or install AMP and use that) than to memorize and navigate voice or beep menu prompts

4. Who can maintain it? Anyone who can RTFM, read English, and navigate vi, pico, or nano -- or a web browser if AMP is installed

I can do the above two, and so can a lot of guys familiar with *nix. But there is still a learning curve. I know the Nortel BCM pretty well, and it'd be pretty easy for me to walk into just about any company and fix a problem they're having because one install doesn't change much from the next. This may not be the case with Asterisk. Maybe I could install some frontend management tools I'm used to, but when you start screwing with a system like that you take the chance of breaking something.

With that said, my point was that if an Asterisk box breaks or needs maintenance and I'm not around for whatever reason, will my boss be able to open a phone book and find someone who can fix the problem? If a Nortel/Panasonic/etc system breaks, you look up "Telephone Repair" and find a shop who specializes in your system. Calling guys up at random and saying "hey we have an Asterisk system..Got anyone down there who can fix our problem" would be problematic and would earn me the ire of my superiors for the trouble.

5. re: The consequences of this are that that no two Asterisk installations will likely be anything alike,

This is NOT a weakness. I don't have an Avaya, Nortel, Panasonic, or (other proprietary PBX) 8-line or 4-line or 24-line system that needs to be thrown away and replaced by a new system when the need for more lines arises. Just add another FXO card or two, or at worst, another asterisk box and link them together.

The weakness I described was is not because of expandability problems - It's because of the situtation outlined above regarding system maintenance. The only one who is truly specialized in a custom asterisk build is you. Now I take it you've got a pretty decent setup going since you seem to know a lot about it - If you stepped away from your box and it broke, how easily would the people left using the system be able to find someone to repair it...fast?

Please understand that I am not calling Asterisk useless. Actually, I think it's a nice piece of software that I might personally find useful - It might not be bad to run at my house. What I'm saying is that I can't deploy it at my company because it'd be too hard for my superiors to find someone to muck through it if I'm not available.

Microsoft Windows 2000 Server?!?!?!?!

[ChrisGilliard]

Ok, maybe I'm a Unix guy, but was this really something that changed the network? I know a lot of people have it installed, and run webservers, etc on it (usually because they are forced to or don't know any better), but if you want to put this on there it just seems like there are others that should be there like Solaris, Red Hat, Suze, FreeBSD just to name a few.

Re:Microsoft Windows 2000 Server?!?!?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, the title says "20 Products The Changed Networking". No one mentioned "changed for the better".

Re:Microsoft Windows 2000 Server?!?!?!?!

[misleb]

They did mention open source, so that kinda covers Linux and FreeBSD. But yeah, I don't really see why Windows 2000 was so special. It had active directory, well Netware was doing directories years before Win2k. The article did mention CodeRed, so I guess that is Win2k's contribution.. the Internet crippling worm.

-matthew

Re:Microsoft Windows 2000 Server?!?!?!?!

[WindBourne]

Well, how else could somebody have scored 10's of millions of credit cards, hollywood phone numbers, origin point of millions of spam a day, etc. After all, you do have to give credit where due.

Re:Microsoft Windows 2000 Server?!?!?!?!

[0racle]

How long was LDAP the 'next big thing' in enterprise networking? Guess which OS actually brought LDAP to most of the worlds enterprise networks.

Out of your list, only Solaris really deserves to be there as far as world changing OS's and even then saying genuine, generic Unix would be more correct. FreeBSD does not have a huge earth shattering install base, and Linux only began to see large scale adoption when it became good enough to replace existing Unix deployments. That was because it was free.

Re:Microsoft Windows 2000 Server?!?!?!?!

[mjm1231]

How long was LDAP the 'next big thing' in enterprise networking? Guess which OS actually brought LDAP to most of the worlds enterprise networks.

Of course you mean NetWare, right?

Re:Microsoft Windows 2000 Server?!?!?!?!

[MadMorf]

How long was LDAP the 'next big thing' in enterprise networking? Guess which OS actually brought LDAP to most of the worlds enterprise networks.

Um, that would be NetWare, with NDS, not Win2K with AD...

Re:Microsoft Windows 2000 Server?!?!?!?!

[MikeBabcock]

Wait wait, I know this one.

Novell.

About 5 years prior?

Just because Novell wasn't that "popular" by the time Win2k came out doesn't mean it didn't bring LDAP to the majority of computer business users in its own day.

Active Directory is a copycat product, like most MS innovations.

Re:Microsoft Windows 2000 Server?!?!?!?!

[0racle]

Guess again. The NDS tree was very nice and showed what could be done when someone actually deployed the 'next big thing,' but LDAP was STILL the next big thing even with Netware being sold.

Like it or not, Windows 2000 was installed in more places then Netware ever was. If you ran a Windows 2000 domain, you used the Active Directory and people who had never touched NDS began deploying LDAP on their networks.

Re:Microsoft Windows 2000 Server?!?!?!?!

[mjm1231]

Thinking that it is possible that one of us has a faulty memory, I tried to quickly do a little research into the matter. I could not find the hard numbers that I would have liked, such as number of businesses using each technology by year, etc. However, I did find two articles on the sales of Netware (release date Oct 98) and Windows 2000 (release date Dec 99).

The Netware article indicates 3.8 million server licenses in use as of Q3 1997. A conservative estimate would place half of those as running NDS(Meaning pre Netware 4.11 versions, as you can't run Netware 4.11 and later without NDS/eDirectory). The other article says, according to Microsoft's own numbers, that Windows 2000 server sales reached 1 million by March, 2001. Even if Netware sales were 0 in this time period (and I worked for a fairly typical VAR at the time... sales were about even, though Windows2000 definitely began to pull ahead during 2001) this would have the number of AD networks at about half the number of NDS networks. But even that estimate is high, because the article also states:

"...survey data from 1,200 information technology customers worldwide. Of these, 30 percent have installed Windows 2000 Server. But only 10 to 15 percent of those have deployed Active Directory..."

You might want to rethink your statement of "If you ran a Windows 2000 domain, you used the Active Directory "

Yeah, AD eventually overtook NDS in sales and installations, much the way that IE eventually killed Netscape. But that doesn't mean that IE was there first, and neither was AD. I would guess that there were very few large businesses at the time that didn't start with NDS before moving to AD.

NCSA httpd?

[Jeffrey Baker]

I'll grant them most of these entries, but Apache was clearly not the first free web server. NCSA httpd was the first, and Apache is a derivative of that. The two coexisted for a few years, during which period it was possible to switch between them without even changing the config file. I think NCSA httpd project finally expired around 1996.

Re:NCSA httpd?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

I think the CERN webserver predated even NCSA. It never got lots of traction. Any one know the timelines better?

Re:NCSA httpd?

[larry bagina]

Tim Berners Lee/CERN developed the first Web server (obviously :). NCSA was a pioneer, but CERN, Plexus, etc, were earlier.

Re:NCSA httpd?

[thogard]

The CERN server was huge and slow and used a huge amount of resources to run. All the new cool stuff was done on on the NCSA server so it developed faster.

Re:NCSA httpd?

[nolife]

Here is a pretty good "internet" timeline reference. Not much specific to web servers but does mention CERN and the first web server in 1991.

Re:NCSA httpd?

[elronxenu]

I ran the CERN webserver. At random intervals it would suck up all the available CPU and memory. Was glad to change that for Apache!

Re:NCSA httpd?

[Tim C]

NCSA httpd was the first, and Apache is a derivative of that.

Hence the name, of course - Apache is "a patchy" webserver, as it started off life as a bunch of patches to NCSA httpd.

Re:NCSA httpd?

[HaydnH]

Hence the name, of course - Apache is "a patchy" webserver, as it started off life as a bunch of patches to NCSA httpd.

Well according to the Apache group this isn't actually true, although I believe it is - I just think they're trying to get away from the original meaning of the name.

In relation to the parent post, if I remember correctly they started creating Apache as NCSA had stopped being developed.

Re:NCSA httpd?

[HaydnH]

As I said, they must be trying to get away from the "patchy" image, from the current site there are arguments against the name, and other places saying that it's a legend (see 1995).

However, they certainly used to say "a patchy" was where the name came from - and I believe that the new reason (respect for american indians) is a cover up =P

Re:NCSA httpd?

[eln]

CERN was hugely popular in the early web. Until NCSA started gaining traction, CERN was the ONLY web server. I ran it, everyone I knew that had a web server (that would be maybe 10 people in the whole state at the time) ran it. It wasn't until NCSA Mosaic started really taking off that you saw a lot of NCSA httpd servers.

missing options

[dotpavan]

1) Myspace
2) facebook
3) friendster
4) hi5

these greatly improved my network ;)

Re:missing options

[misleb]

Are you 14 years old or what?

-matthew

Re:missing options

[dotpavan]

instead of the wink, I shall have a huge banner shouting: "sarcasm sarcasm!" from next time

Re:missing options

[scibbers]

....and greatly increased the amount of spam in my inbox

SQL server 7.0

[heatdeath]

Where's SQL server 7.0? It changed the way we thought about worms and default passwords. :-D

5 network-screwing products

[Spy der Mann]

OK, that was the good things. Now let's remember the bad things and how they started.

- Adware. Ah.... the Gator download manager (TM). Didn't you love this thing? It was free! Only it began displaying some ads in your computer. What could possibly go wrong?

- SPAM. Funny, the other day i began receiving mails about mortgage rates. Idiots, I'm too young for that. I'll ignore it, they're 1 in a 100.

- Popups. OK, this is getting annoying. I'll have to block images from these free websites like XOOM, Geocities, Angelfire and so on.

- Web viruses. The other day something weird went on. I went to a porn website, and the next day my PC began opening popups. WTF?

- Email viruses. Ack! All I did was open my mail on Outlook express!

It's funny. We take these things for granted, but I remember the days when they didn't exist AT ALL. It was a wonderful era. Also worthy of notice is that all of them (except popups) were possible thanks to Microsoft Windows(TM).

Re:5 network-screwing products

[mkiwi]

It's funny. We take these things for granted, but I remember the days when they didn't exist AT ALL. It was a wonderful era. Also worthy of notice is that all of them (except popups) were possible thanks to Microsoft Windows(TM).

Eh hem, it's

Microsoft® Windows®

You don't want Steve Ballmer to throw a chair at you, do you? :)

See MS Trademarks

Re:5 network-screwing products

[xrayspx]

I think Canter and Siegel would have done their crap with or without Windows, so SPAM is another that wasn't courtesy of Microsoft. I'm thinking that Adware probably would have popped up for different platforms if, say, 99% of everyone was running a Mac at the time. Email Viruses though, that's sticky, anything that is so crazy about trying to tie kitchen-sink functionality into one app is asking to get burned. I guess by that logic, EMACS has been asking to get burned for 20+ years.

Re:5 network-screwing products

[secolactico]

- Email viruses. Ack! All I did was open my mail on Outlook express!

It's funny. We take these things for granted, but I remember the days when they didn't exist AT ALL.

Ah, yeah, those days... I remember when I did tech support/installations. "Good Times" email "virus" was pretty popular back then, and I used to tell my customers, "Don't worry, ignore that message. There's no way you can get a virus via email unless you open the attachement. Simply reading your mail is perfectly safe".

This was in the days of Internet Explorer 3 and "Internet Mail and News". I dunno if they were susceptible to this viruses.

I was just plain glad that when the first "Outlook express" viruses came up, my professional tech support days were over.

Re:5 network-screwing products

[Anonymous Coward]

WHAT?!? Flamebait? Who ever marked it that way needs to double check what web site they are on!

Besides, there is a legitimate question in there. Did't Mac have TCP/IP native before windows? I swear the time line of some things in that article just have to be wrong...

Oh, and as for the flamebait thing, proove me wrong... where did I state any thing that was not true? Windows has no proper seperation between the kernel and user environments and this is common knowledge. Their TCP/IP stack has always been poorly implemented and this is common knowlede. Unix had TCP/IP before either of them and this is common knowledge.

What's wrong with you d00d? Are you an M$ fanboy or something? I cannot beleive any exist, besides people currently employeed at M$... that's like being a fan of stabbing your self in the arm with a knife! Oh wait, there are people like that... hehe

Re:5 network-screwing products

[emjoi_gently]

Okay... pre Web... - Ethernet Coaxial Terminators. A user at the end of the line innocently removing one of those things could bring an entire buildings networking to it's knees.

Re:5 network-screwing products

[cyber-vandal]

A large proportion of adware exists because until XP SP2 IE's default settings allowed any old website to download and install anything in the background. Anyone with half a brain could have seen that as a recipe for disaster.
It's not the install base, it's the incompetence and the monoculture. I haven't had anything worse than a few tracking cookies since I started using FF and that's a fairly big target nowadays.
Had MS not insisted on their own browser and email client in order to tie people to their platform then maybe the history of malware, and the resulting aggravation and expense, could have been different.

Re:5 network-screwing products

[Anonymous Coward]

I usually hate to play the stock Mac fanboy on /. but...

- Adware... check.
- Popups... check.
- Web viruses... check.
- Email viruses... check.
- SPAM!... sorry, no.

Four out of five. Not bad for a design company with a stupid fruit logo, eh?

Re:5 network-screwing products

[capecodcarl]

- Email viruses. Ack! All I did was open my mail on Outlook express!

I remember doing tech support for a local ISP about 10 years ago and someone called up frantically saying that they got a message warning them about an e-mail virus going around and if you opened a message with a subject of "Good times" you'd get infected. I thought "that's the most idiotic thing I've ever heard of, you can't infect your computer with a simple ASCII text e-mail" and low and behold, I traced it down to a hoax. Little did I know that within a few short years Microsoft would invent the world's first e-mail virus proliferation platform. Now THAT is true innovation from Redmond. Bravo.

Re:5 network-screwing products

[tigersha]

Or the little shit student who is writing a practical exam and didn't study for it in a lab could bring the whole exam to grief.

Re:5 network-screwing products

[Spy der Mann]

I usually hate to play the stock Mac fanboy on /. but...

Pardon me? I don't own a Mac. I'm a MS prisoner, and this lack of options (Linux is still NOT usable for me) is killing me.

synoptics?

[winkydink]

Wasn't Cabletron the early leader in the 10BASE-T hubs? That's seems to be my recollection.

Re:synoptics?

[tomherbst]

Cabletron and Synoptics were the two major leading competitors as proprietary Ethernet over twisted pair moved to 10BaseT. As I recall, Synoptics sold more and innovated more, but Cabletron kept them honest, especially on price. SynOptics did the heavy lifting on the 10BaseT spec.

tom

Re:synoptics?

[Firehed]

We're talking how long ago now, though? Maybe I'm just being stupid about this, but it seems way too trivial to be genuinely concerned about who the first leader of 10BASE-T hubs was when you can get a 5-port gigabit switch for your home network for $20. That said, I still remember when I was sure 10/100 didn't mean megabits per second because that was just way too far ahead of 56k.

Re:synoptics?

[winkydink]

We're talking around 1990. If you had ever had to manage 10BASE5 or 10BASE2, you will recall the arrival of 10BASE-T with much joy.

AIM messenger!

[Spy der Mann]

I agree with you on something. Remove skype and add MSN/YIM/AIM/ICQ.

These non-anonymous chat services changed the way we relate to people on the web, replacing the untrusty anonymous IRC. It gave the ability to chat to every joe user.

Re:AIM messenger!

[Sqwubbsy]

These non-anonymous chat services changed the way we relate to people on the web, replacing the untrusty anonymous IRC.

Riiiiigggghhhhhhtttt.
Because we all trust somebody who just pops up on AIM.

Re:AIM messenger!

[fossa]

I think he meant that AIM screen names are typically exchanged by friends prior to conversing, and one can be fairly sure that a given screen name is attached to the same person each conversation. Not that this is impossible with IRC, just less convenient.

Re:AIM messenger!

[AnyoneEB]

/mode #chan +R

As you were saying... ?

Re:AIM messenger!

[dougmc]

472 R : is unknown mode char to me

As you were saying... ?

Fails on Efnet, Undernet. On IRCnet --

345 #fodfd : End of Channel Reop List

I don't think that's what you were referring to ...

Dalnet won't let me in, it's like all the servers are down or something, so I can't check that ...

Perhaps this is part of why IRC isn't the killer application -- AIM, Yahoo, MSN etc. are. IRC was great when I discovered it in 1990 or so, but people now want instant gratification, and IRC isn't that.

Re:AIM messenger!

[AnyoneEB]

Well, I guess that made a pretty good point against IRC: not much is really standard. On DynastyNet, setting a channel mode +R means that only registered users can join the channel. I assume that other networks have a similiar feature.

wifi

[irimi_00]

Which of those companies is the big wifi manufacturer/distributor?

visual traceroute

[Douglas Simmons]

I find that xt, visual xtraceroute, only knows the geographical location of one in twenty hops. This thing which is an online visual traceroute somehow does a lot better.

w2k server?

[jaymzter]

Am I missing something? How did Widows 2000 Server "change" networking? They mention AD, but if that's the case then LDAP could've been listed just as well. Claiming that Windows was susceptible to Code Red is no big deal either. You could claim the Morris internet worm had a longer lasting effect on networking in the long run.

Re:w2k server?

[misleb]

As mentioned in the article, Novell was doing hierachal directories long before (and better than) Win2k. LDAP in and of itself wouldn't count because it wasn't use to centralize network management like NDS and AD were. Even today, generic LDAP based network management pales in comparison to NDS (now eDirectory).

-matthew

Does the auther even know what their talking about

[Anonymous Coward]

As the first completely open source operating system, it became the most dominant platform for innovative network products since Linus Torvalds released Version 0.02 of the Linux kernel. It might not be as pervasive on the desktop or server installation as people were expecting it to be by now, but it set the stage for Darwin/OS X, which rejuvenated Apple as another challenge to Microsoft's Windows-everywhere charge.

Ok, isn't Darwin derived from the BSD Kernel, which is something that more or less has been around for much longer that Linux or Windows?

And what's this about Linux not being pervasive? What about the MAJORITY of Web servers out there running it ? Particularly if, like this author, you aren't making a distinction between BSD and Linux.

ugh, fluff

[Geekboy(Wizard)]

christ almighty, this article is pure fluff. do the people at network world even *use* networks? christ almighty. "skype was a top 20 network changing product"?

Re:ugh, fluff

[heatdeath]

do the people at network world even *use* networks? christ almighty. "skype was a top 20 network changing product"?

Do you even *read* the news?

Skype was a pioneer of what will probably become a major unique networking scenario in the next few years. All of the major network software companies are jumping on the bandwagon, and I'm sure it's going to be a scenario that drives a lot of changes.

Re:ugh, fluff

[SharkFarmer]

Who cares? These things are all about the swag. Give me one of those neat mice with the floating letter 'T' in it or whatever it is, and why don't they open a beer stand at the hall door? NOw I have to walk all the way down to the hotel bar at 9AM. Check out that chick from Cisco, trophy rep for sure but holy shmokes!!

Re:ugh, fluff

[KiloByte]

The only innovation Skype did was working around NATs. Beating ugly hacks with ugly hacks just for the sake of short-term luser-friendliness. Bleh.

We had dozens of VoIP programs a long time before Skype; what made them unpopular were troubles caused by ISPs. The end-of-life announcement of SpeakFreely is a good read.

Basically, the #1 reason why IPv6 is not widely deployed yet is that it makes VoIP and peer-to-peer work flawlessly, something that goes against the concept of tiered internet. Those "major network companies" you're speaking of are our enemies, not friends.

Re:ugh, fluff

[murdocj]

Basically, the #1 reason why IPv6 is not widely deployed yet is that it makes VoIP and peer-to-peer work flawlessly, something that goes against the concept of tiered internet. Those "major network companies" you're speaking of are our enemies, not friends.

Cue the black helicopters...

Show Sendmail Some Respect

[InitZero]

Yes, it is true. Mike Tyson could probably kick
Muhammad Ali's ass. Of course, Mike Tyson is also
nearly 20 years younger. So, who is the better boxer?

        For as much email has been run through sendmail in
the last couple decades, I'm always disappointed at how
little respect it receives.
        I built my first mail server in 1993 using sendmail.
It brought internet email to my company over a serial
uucp link. By 1996, sendmail was moving nearly 87,000
internet messages a day for our company (not bad for a
486DX4-100 with a whopping 32M RAM (64M?)).
        Saying the latest mail software (qmail, postfix, etc.)
is better than something written in 1972 - 27 years ago -
isn't saying much. (Well, maybe: Duh!)
        Heck, 27 computing years is like 350 human years.

        So, before you complain about security holes (one
in the last two years?) or complexity (like any other
programming language, practice makes perfect), why don't
you tell me which mail transport software you used in
1975, 1985 or 1995. Then, follow that up with which
transports you expect to see a lot of in 2010 and 2020.

        Matt

Re:Show Sendmail Some Respect

[Cheapy]

sendmail is a computer programming language?

Re:Show Sendmail Some Respect

[Anonymous Coward]

You can argue that sendmail is an interpreter for the configuration file format found in /etc/sendmail.cf (and /etc/mail/submit.cf).
That format has many properties of a programming language.

Re:Show Sendmail Some Respect

[ivoras]

sendmail is a computer programming language?

Yes. http://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/sendmail-as-turin g-machine.txt

Re:Does the auther even know what their talking ab

[Anonymous Coward]

1) That text is poorly written. 2) Linux was not the "first completely open source operating system". 3) Linux is irrelevant wrt OS X. NeXTStep predates Linux. Apple fooled around with Linux (mkLinux), but they also had a commercial MacOS/Unix hybrid (A/UX) in 1988.

BitTorrent

[STFS]

I miss bittorrent from that list.

Re:BitTorrent

[KeithIrwin]

Seriously. How can you leave off an application which now accounts for more than half of the traffic on the internet? And that's without even talking about its effects in terms of changing the economics of delivering large files to large quantities of users.

Keith

Re:Does the auther even know what their talking ab

[Burdell]

There are a number of things wrong with that article (Sendmail Switch was largely a non-event AFAIK; the original sendmail was the "big moment"). However, Linux being the first (at least first major) fully Open Source system is probably correct.

At the time Linux was started, the BSD code base was still tied up in the AT&T lawsuit. Some parts had to be removed from distribution, leaving an incomplete system. The various BSD based projects had to rewrite some bits to fill in the removed stuff to get a working OS. IIRC Linus has said that if that hadn't been the case (or if GNU Hurd had really come about as planned), he never would have started his own kernel project.

Early Linux distributions pulled in a good bit of GNU, BSD, and X/MIT licensed code and integrated it (at least to some extent). Nobody else had really pulled all the various bits together (and GNU and BSD didn't have a functioning kernel at that point).

Typical article about technology from a journalist

[leereyno]

This article, like most articles of its type, contains misleading generalities and outright factual errors.

1) Apache was NOT the first free web server. Both CERN httpd and NCSA's httpd predate it, and both were free.
2) Netscape and Spyglass's version of Mosaic were the first commercial WEB BROWSERS. The article states that both were the first commercial GUI's. Last time I checked the first commercial GUI was to be found on the Xerox Star circa 1981. Terminology matters, when you do not use a term correctly you create confusion and/or make yourself look like an arse.

The problem with these sorts of articles, and the magazines in which they appear, is that they're being written by journalists. I can't tell you the number of times over the years that I've had the misfortune of reading something computer related in a magazine or newspaper and discovered multiple serious factual errors. I've come to accept this from periodicals that don't normally deal with computers or technology, but I'm pretty much fed up with finding errors in PC magazine on a regular ongoing basis.

Who are the people who write these articles? There are some people who are interested in computers but aren't quite there yet in terms of their understanding. Many are not blessed with "the knack" (http://home.pcisys.net/~tbc/sounds/dilknack.wav) Others are so blessed, but are still neophytes. Either way they're very good at creating and passing on erroneous information about computers and technology.

Lee

Remote Access

[drwho]

Sendmail is one of the most successful remote-access programs ever.

Sendmail has provided the essential r00t access for hax0rz to improve their skills in the past. Before Linux was cheap and available, one had to go out, and like a predator, acquire one's operating system privs. Sendmail was teh great enabler. Though I have moved on to better and brighter things, I thank Alman, and Vixie, for their great success in bringing r00t to the large number of adolescents everywhere.

Re:Remote Access

[Anonymous Coward]

thanks for the chuckle. i wonder how many
folks realize how true that is.

Several Missing

[Tyir]

A couple that come to mind:
Nothing DNS related? I would think that bind would quality as a network changing piece of software.

Mabye it is a bit early, but I think Bit Torrent is going to be as revolutionary as Napster, althought I think time will tell.

Re:Several Missing

[Subrafta]

I no longer use DNS / BIND -- I use bittorent to download the Internet hosts file every night.

Wireless?

[user24]

subject says it all really.

I'd say that the two most profound things to happen to networking, aside from it's mere existence, are p2p and wireless. All the other things are just what's necessary in order to have a network (to a greater or lesser degree), but p2p and wireless have fundamentally changed what networking is, not just how we do it.

Re:Wireless?

[xrayspx]

Right there on page 2. AT&T WaveLAN.

I don't think these are in any particular order, otherwise I'd think webservers and browsers would have rated a tad higher.

Re:Wireless?

[user24]

oh bugger, oops.

I thought it was time sorted, so having flicked through the whole lot (and missed that one) I went backwards but when I hit win95 I stopped.
d'oh.

Re:Wireless?

[user24]

actually they are time sorted, I just didn't realise wLAN had been around so long..

Re:Wireless?

[xrayspx]

I can't see any rhyme or reason to the sorting, which is fine I guess. It's kind of a messy list as has been pointed out before (Yes SKYPE, no IRC, Yes Cellphone, No VPN?). How about IM, TCP/IP, maybe instead of Skype, how about VOIP as a concept?

Citrix?

[kahanamoku]

Although there are many others out there, citrix should've at least rated a mention! it has changed the face of many remote connectivity environments all over the place!

Re:Citrix?

[Just Some Guy]

Although there are many others out there, citrix should've at least rated a mention!

OK, here it is:

• 1989: Citrix is founded to create a commercial product with the functionality of MIT's X Window System, which originated in 1984 - and was in turn derived from still older systems.

I think that should just about cover it.

NCSA Mosaic

[erice]

The web began with Cern's browser, of course, but it was not the Web as we know it today. More of an improved gopher. NCSA Mosaic was the first graphical browser and that changed everything.

Netscape was just an improved NCSA Mosaic, albiet a hugely popular one. Smoother, faster, but network changing? I think not. Spyglass was an early ancestor of IE and, I think, AOL's browser but as itself it changed nothing.

WTF?

[chaoticgeek]

Umm... I don't know what Skype and Napster have to do with Network Revolutions. Sure they are good applications, but do they really mean that much? I don't use Skype, and I rarely use P2P software, other than downloading Linux ISOs. But its not like I could not live without bittorent.

Yes and no.

[jd]

Yes, there were some strange protocols around at the time for mail - X.400 for example. But sendmail probably doesn't support many of these. Besides, even back then, it was considered ugly to design things as monolithic programs. Truly modular designs did not appear until dynamic linking became portable/usable, but basic modularity in the form of program piping has always existed.

(Indeed, all of the original Unix tools are written as pipelined utilities. If Sendmail had been written in this manner, you would have had a few hundred executables - BUT they would have been faster, more secure, and much more flexible. Small, modular kits have always been the "accepted" Unix way of Getting Things Right. Large, monolithic lumps have always been disparaged as probably bug-ridden and Bad.)

Re:Yes and no.

[zerocool^]

This is a fallacy, and one that Linus himself debunks in his auto-biography.

A monolithic program may look more complex and harder to maintain and secure (and I'll admit, I hate sendmail), having a HUNDRED binaries as part of this program would add an order of magnitude of complexity that is entirely unnecesary.

Think: While it is true that a singular, small program which does one task is simpler than a monolithic giant, the program (as a whole, encompassing all the small parts) will still need to do all the same stuff a monolithic program has to do, except now it has to deal with message passing between small binary executables, queueing or drop files, and a number of other issues where security is a concern.

It's not as simple as taking parts out of the whole design and implementing them independantly; adding "parts" to the "whole" creates issues which do not exist in the monolithic.

qmail is able to do this fairly well, but it only has about 4 or 5 executables, IIRC, and it is compiled very carefully against bernsteins' special stdio and other library files that he's hardened.

See also: Linux Kernel vs. Hurd or Minix.

~Will

Re:Yes and no.

[Anonymous Coward]

But sendmail probably doesn't support many of these

Good to hear you expert opinion. I'm pretty sure it actually does, though I don't have a list of all the protocols handy. SMTP was relatively rare (few sites were on the net full time when it was written), lots of sites were using stuff like UUCP, and there was/is compatibility with at least three addressing formats.

Besides, even back then, it was considered ugly to design things as monolithic programs.

I'm so glad we have an expert like you to explain all this to us old timers. I recall people writing things they way they felt comfortable with. There were few guidelines, people didn't worry about security, maintainability, etc...

Re:Yes and no.

[dodobh]

Uhm, no.

Message passing and repeated input validation imposes a performance penalty. However, with well defined interfaces, the interdependencies are highly reduced, and maintainance becomes simple.

A large monolithic program leads to complex interdependencies in the code and maintainance becomes difficult.

Security is easy to do, if you design it in right from the beginning (see Postfix, which doesn't even have a custom libc, but is simpler to run than qmail and gives better performance).

Re:Yes and no.

[swillden]

Security is easy to do, if you design it in right from the beginning (see Postfix, which doesn't even have a custom libc, but is simpler to run than qmail and gives better performance).

But Postfix has had far more security holes than qmail. I wouldn't hold Postfix up as an example of good security. Sure it looks good compared to sendmail (what doesn't?), but qmail, while sufficiently hard to work with that I eventually ditched it, has a *very* good security record.

Re:Yes and no.

[dodobh]

Postfix has had two _possible_ security holes, and those would happen if there was a system misconfiguration.

On the other hand, qmail has not been developed since 1998, it still does an accept first and then bounce stance (contributing to the DoS attack of backscatter), it converts multi-recipient mail into single recipient messages when sending out, it doesn't support a lot of things natively, including TLS and SMTP AUTH.....

It is easier to be secure when your code is Hello World..

Sendmail blocking in NZ

[vik]

New Zealand's biggest ISP Xtra is about it implement port 25 blocking, so making Sendmail kinda redundant unless you use the big boy's server:

http://www.geekzone.co.nz/blog.asp?blogid=22&posti d=204

'Course, a fair chunk of Xtra is owned by Microsoft, but that's got nothing to do with it right?

It makes people's mail easier to intercept too, if you only have to get it from centralised mail servers.

It might stop some spam, but then so would chopping the cables.

Vik :v)

Re:Sendmail blocking in NZ

[Anonymous Coward]

Sendmail blocking in general fucking sucks a big one! Frontier Online DSL also blocks port 25, because they also fucking suck!

Re:Sendmail blocking in NZ

[MadMidnightBomber]

New Zealand's biggest ISP Xtra is about it implement port 25 blocking, so making Sendmail kinda redundant unless you use the big boy's server: http://www.geekzone.co.nz/blog.asp?blogid=22&posti d=204 'Course, a fair chunk of Xtra is owned by Microsoft, but that's got nothing to do with it right?

I somehow doubt MS are pushing Exchange at the home market by blocking 25/tcp.

It makes people's mail easier to intercept too, if you only have to get it from centralised mail servers.

So encrypt it, or change ISPs, or both

It might stop some spam, but then so would chopping the cables.

Believe me, I've been been tempted. But that wasn't me with the post-hole digger

an ex-NZ university mail admin

Give respect where it is due

[amightywind]

Many elements of *nix systems remained surprisingly unchanged in the last 25 years: /etc/passwd, init scripts, bourne shell, inetd, .... These are inspired for their utility, simplicity, and cleanliness. They endure. You cannot put Sendmail into this group. Why? The input format may be the worst way to configure a program yet devised. It is closely followed in wretchedness by lpd and /etc/printcap. You should not try to obscure these important facts with lame relativism. I am giddy that I don't have to look at them anymore on my machine.

Important things though not products per se

[Gary Destruction]

Ethernet - it was and still is a standard that people could afford NAT - It made IP networking affordable VPN - It made remote access more feasible Wi-fi - It gave greater freedom to network users

Re:Important things though not products per se

[Slashcrap]

VPN - It made remote access more feasible

And in the case of IPSEC, unfeasibly complicated.

NAT - It made IP networking affordable

And IPSEC even more unfeasibly complex.

Wi-fi - It gave greater freedom to network users

And all their neighbours within a half-mile radius. Still at least when you find that your router doesn't handle IPSEC NAT-Traversal properly, you can just try somebody elses.

That's why you use TLS and SMTP AUTH

[SIGBUS]

If you are running your own mail server outside your ISP's network, you shouldn't be using port 25 in the first place. Configure your mail server to use TLS or SSL with proper authentication, and use port 587 or 465 to send your mail through it.

I have no sympathy for anyone who whines about port 25 being blocked. Judging from the number of zombied PCs trying to send spam to me, I would say that port 25 should be blocked by default at consumer ISPs.

Re:That's why you use TLS and SMTP AUTH

[Anonymous Coward]

I wasn't whining... I just didn't realize RFC 2476 existed before I got frustrated. Peace.

Re:That's why you use TLS and SMTP AUTH

[HaydnH]

I wonder how many web sites registration processess will get broken due to port 25 blocking? After all, php on linux/unix uses sendmail for it's mail function.

AOL

[NullProg]

Give credit. AOL went from 1 million Apple/Commodore/Atari users to twenty million PC users within a couple of years. Compuserve didn't mail out all the free CDs or the story might have ended differently. Anyone remember Prodigy?
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/060112grubisich/

Does anyone also remember what it took for that AOL icon to appear on your fresh Windows install?

Other than that, I question Skype changing the network world.
I was/still am redirecting/receiving local voice/radio/etc over tcp/ip since 1997. Its how I get my NFL fix for free.

Enjoy,

Re:AOL

[Anonymous Coward]

I totally agree. I think the one key factor that brought the internet to the mainstream per AOL was when they decided to change their business model. Back in the early 90s the internet was truly expensive, especially if you became extremely addictive to having access to all the information out there. The only reasonable way to make the internet widely accessible was to make it afforable, and they did that by introducing a monthly subscription. Although most of us have moved away from AOL, and the other ISP service of the early days, I think AOL truthfully paved the way for the internet to catch on as it did. I think AOL could of been an even bigger ISP/OSP hub if they introduced the same pricing model to their online games. I think their gaming service would of been many hundred fold more successful if they included an additional subscription plan (or made it free altogether). They had quite a few fun game back there in the days. I enjoyed the MUDS and some of the first multiplayer FPS. I feel very nostalgic; sweet memories of gemstone iii, darkness falls, tanarus, magestorm, and so forth. It guess it helps when you had an overhead account, but believe it or not, I knew a few people that racked up $200 to $600 a month online gaming. I'm sure their dad beat the heck out of them for it. Glad I didn't have that inconvenience. Its a pity they took so long to embrace broadband in the early days; they had quite a lot of money to fund a thrieving broadband business.

Nostalgia

[Runesabre]

20 years ago I remember taking a high school computer class. The teacher showed us, almost reverently, the 300 baud modem hooked up to one of the TRS-80 computers. I can still remember thinking how cool and impressive that was. None of the students were allowed to come near that "powerful" equipment.

Today, I have a 5mbit download cable modem and just finished a work order to have a dedicated, full T1 put into my house for my new company.

Amazing how times have changed. What hasn't changed is how cool it all still is.

Re:Nostalgia

[dfghjk]

That was closer to 30 years ago. Trash 80's were long out of date by 1986. Modems were commonly 2400 baud and there were fast modems (trailblazers) introduced around that time. Of course, high schools could have been a decade out of date.

My first modem was a Prometheus 1200 in 1983. I've had a T1 in my home for over 5 years. Can't wait to get rid of it and stop paying those bills.

BSD TCP/IP stack

[MavEtJu]

Without it, we would all be stuck with the BBN implementation of it.

offtopic, google ad, teh funnee!1

[Anonymous Coward]

so I reload the front page, see the google ads on the side. On my browser, the last ad is truncated, this is what I see:

    Reverse Brain Aging
    Scientifically Proven Bra

*think* of the possibilities!

What about the smail MTA?

[Clith]

smail was supposed to be loads easier to set up and use than sendmail, since back around 1986ish.

SSH?

[Werrismys]

I'd say SSH over most things.

Re:Typical article about technology from a journal

[Phil John]

Apache was NOT the first free web server. Both CERN httpd and NCSA's httpd predate it, and both were free.

Well, Apache started off as a set of patches for NSCA httpd afer Rob McCool (still the best name in Computer Science) left, so it could be seen as the continuation of NCSA httpd, so, more of a name change than a new product.

Oh, you poor old old-timers.

[jd]

Back in the days when I was an old-timer, we had to code 37 hours a day! Uphill, both ways!

Seriously, anyone who calls themselves an Old-Timer in a field that is barely over 60 years old, is either a former co-worker of Turing or Von Neumann - the only generation with any business adding the word "old" - or they don't have enough understanding of the field to qualify.

Operating Systems in general are relatively new things. MULTICS is "historic", but only in the sense that it isn't in use. It has many ideas I consider valuable today, and I wish it was easier to get hold of MULTICS code, but it is far from ancient.

The odds are fairly high, though, that most "old-timers" on Slashdot are from the Unix or even the CP/M generation. Some might even call themselves "old-timers" when they only really started with DOS 3.1 or even something as modern as Windows 3.0!

I predate CP/M - not by much - but that doesn't matter because I don't claim to be an Old-Timer. Experienced, sure. Aware, certainly. Old-timer? No. I can tell you what I saw - from the control center at Jodrel Bank's Lovell Telescope to Imperial Computer's minis at Daresbury, from dusty Forth manuals to robotics and micromice - the word was Small. Small was good. Small was in. Small made Smartware one of the best damn integrated packages of that era in computing - and it outperformed many later generation systems. Small made Acornsoft's "Elite" the hottest game ever published by any title, as a percentage of the userbase it sold to.

Not sure if PETSpeed was small & unit-based. Wouldn't surprise me. You couldn't fit much even in a 32K machine, so modules would be logical.

As for Linus -- we're talking about Torvalds, right? The one who produced Linux, probably the most modular (and therefore smallest) OS ever released on this planet? The one who gave up on monolithic maintenance because he couldn't scale, so modularized even the maintenance process? You'd use him as an illustration for monolithic design, given that he hasn't used that in Linux in God-lost-count number of years?

Re:Oh, you poor old old-timers.

[Kjella]

Seriously, anyone who calls themselves an Old-Timer in a field that is barely over 60 years old, is either a former co-worker of Turing or Von Neumann - the only generation with any business adding the word "old" - or they don't have enough understanding of the field to qualify.

My dad used to scope single bits from radio tubes, working for IBM. My mom used to punch up punchcards. I think that qualifies as old-timer. Though if you use the term old-timer to mean "someone with experience", I'm going to laugh. To me, that is a term which means "historic and outdated trivia" with little relevance to the present. They're both completely disconnected from current hardware and software.

I think I'm in an excellent generation, where you with a little bit of programming skill could approach commercial software and do "impressive" things. If I was a teenager today, I'm not sure I'd be motivated enough. I could in all seriousness say "I want to program a [Space Invaders,Pac Man,Frog] clone". Try saying "I want to program a World of Warcraft/Oblivion/Half-Life 2 clone" with a straight face.

As for Linus -- we're talking about Torvalds, right? The one who produced Linux, probably the most modular (and therefore smallest) OS ever released on this planet? The one who gave up on monolithic maintenance because he couldn't scale, so modularized even the maintenance process? You'd use him as an illustration for monolithic design, given that he hasn't used that in Linux in God-lost-count number of years?

You mean to say that companies that use a monolithic design don't do this? And here I was, thinking that the "Microsoft as Borg" icon was just part of the MS bashing. If monolithic design meant one-man design, I think that discussion would have been ended long time ago...

Re:Oh, you poor old old-timers.

[Alioth]

If you liked Elite, try Oolite - a recent open source recreation (now runs on Windows, as well as Mac and Linux). http://oolite.aegidian.org/

Re:Oh, you poor old old-timers.

[swillden]

. If I was a teenager today, I'm not sure I'd be motivated enough. I could in all seriousness say "I want to program a [Space Invaders,Pac Man,Frog] clone". Try saying "I want to program a World of Warcraft/Oblivion/Half-Life 2 clone" with a straight face.

OTOH, open source has given up and coming programmers of the new generation the opportunity to tinker with massive software projects (including non-trivial games -- even if they're not WoW, etc.) and to see what lots of well-written code looks like. I think that generation of developers will be far better at reading code and getting their heads around complex frameworks than our generation. I think we have too much of a tendency to want to rewrite everything just because that's how we're used to getting our heads around the project. But maybe that's just me :-)

Windows 95??? Mac OS 7!!!!

[Foo2rama]

Windows 95 was the first OS to make it easy to get on the net. OK, mac system 7.0 circa 1991 had a full ethernet setup and supported tcp/ip which you could change without having to restart(GASP!!!) It took untill XP for windows not to need to be restarted to change tcp/ip settings. Not to mention that dealing with anything network related everything up to windows ME was frustrating and counter intuitive. Any remembersetting up pppoe on those systems? system 7.0 was 32bit set the benchmark for consumer GUI and set the stage for all mac OS's untill the release of osX in 2001. 10 years and the OS was still running strong from a user standpoint (I know the mem codeing was horrid.)


I am not trying to be a Mac fanboy here but, it took untill at least windows 98 and argueably XP for ease of use consumer networking on windows.

Re:Windows 95??? Mac OS 7!!!!

[innit]

took untill XP for windows not to need to be restarted to change tcp/ip settings

Untrue, Windows 2000 did it too.

Re:Windows 95??? Mac OS 7!!!!

[Foo2rama]

Windows 2000 is not a consumer OS as I specified, it is a server or enterprise solution. Windows XP took the core of 2000 and brought it to the consumer. Windows 95 was listed as it gave ease of use to consumers to get on the net.

Re:Does the auther even know what their talking ab

[ignorant_newbie]

At the time Linux was started, the BSD code base was still tied up in the AT&T lawsuit. Some parts had to be removed from distribution, leaving an incomplete system. The various BSD based projects had to rewrite some bits to fill in the removed stuff to get a working OS.

6 files. 4.4BSD lite was 4.4BSD with 6 files taken out. This is not exactly a huge deal. The reason noone wanted to touch BSD at the time was not technical, but that they didn't know how the lawsuit would come out.

CERN httpd was...

[kusako]

The first open source web server ( I ran one on a NeXT cube for some years ). NCSA added CGI which made it quickly the more popular choice. CERN also developed the first web browser (called World Wide Web), open source as well.
But of course, as CERN is not a US institution it probably doesn't count...

Horrible article

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy who wrote this is clueless beyond belief. Linux wasn't the first open source operating system. Ever heard of BSD? And the Windows shit, fer christ's sake. Windows 2000 changed nothing in the networking world. He is also wrong on the apache part and on the web browser part.

The BSD TCP/IP stack was a big milestone in the networking world. I didn't see it mentioned. I also didn't see all the stuff that came before. And come one, why does it mention Sendmail in 1998? By 1998 Sendmail had been in use for what, 10 years already?

Re:Ugh...

[Marcion]

Yeah you are right. The article is a unoriginal and obvious. Unless you are very new to computers (well done for getting to /. already) then the article is really not worth bothering about. Move along, nothing to see here people...

I'm really surprised it got onto the front page at all. I fail to see any merit in it at all.

About the parent post. It is intereseting that an actual comment on the article (i.e. it is on topic), abeit expressed in a direct and non-verbose form, "Article Sucks", is modded as a Troll. The article does really suck... and the '20 people who changed the industry' is actually a bit better.

Oh well just my 2p....

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Netscape 1.0

[houghi]

Netscape 1.0 Unfortunatly only for Windows and many sites won't work.

Lists are subjective at best, but....

[ami-in-hamburg]

Compuserve
BBS
Encrypted communications in general
Fibre
DNS

just off the top of my head....

Re:wifi, It depends what you mean by

[amcdiarmid]

Big Wifi Manufacturer/Distributor. AT&T made the articles they put in the list. However, wifi stuff was spun out to Lucent with the Bell Breakup.

Specifically, I never saw wifi stuff untill '98 when I started seeing a bunch of Proxim stuff. (I think Intel bought them.) Never saw much of the Lucent stuff, but be aware, the Orinoco WiFi cards are VERY popular for war-driving. (Not many laptop cards had external antenna connectors.)

One could argue that Cisco (also on the list) is the big wifi manufacturer/distributor. The Cisco stuff is common in the Enterprise, and the Linksys stuff is in many homes and SMB's.

DNS

[Yonder Way]

It's just outside of the 20 year scope of this article but I don't think anything changed what was to become the Internet more than DNS back in '83. Before that we were all sharing a big hostfile.

If this weren't /. I would have been surprised that this article even got posted. For example, to mention Skype in the same breath as Sendmail... Sendmail quickly became something that everyone relied upon for email. Skype is just one solution used by some people, but certainly not everyone. Not by a long shot. And it's not really revolutionary so much as evolutionary. So I think there is a great disparity between the impact felt by some of these technologies.

Re:Typical article about technology from a journal

[Kjella]

2) Netscape and Spyglass's version of Mosaic were the first commercial WEB BROWSERS. The article states that both were the first commercial GUI's. Last time I checked the first commercial GUI was to be found on the Xerox Star circa 1981.

It was the first commercial GUI for the web. And as we know the web is the Internet. And since computers didn't exist before the intarnets, at least not any of importance, it was the first commercial GUI. See? Reporting at its best.

They Forgot....

[pedalman]

Whitehouse.com

BitchX Anyone?

[capitalj]

I mean come one now that is a proper tool.

Obligatory...

[Sigg3.net]

The goatse guy...
As Wireless changed the way we did networking, goatse changed what we didn't do networking..

Uhngh -- small correction

[hummassa]

Debian [and Ubuntu] uses postfix :-)

Re:Uhngh -- small correction

[tigersha]

SuSE uses Postfix too. Postfix (like many other MTA's) has a command called 'sendmail' used to send local mails (think cronjob report) that emulates the sendmail command line. That might add to the confusion, but that program is not used as an MTA server. This is because the sendmail command line syntax is very much ubiquitous in the UNIX world.

Re:Uhngh -- small correction

[HaydnH]

Debian sarge uses Exim4 as the default MTA... you can hear that from Martin Michlmayr (project leader @ Debian) or from postfix install instructions for debian at debianhelp.

I didn't realise suse had moved away from sendmail after version 8 though - you learn something new everyday =P

Cheap HW thanks to Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

This thread is heavy on SW and oftly light on the HW.

When Intel redefined networking the late 90s the cost of Ethernet went from 300-400 bucks for 10Mbs to 150 for 100Mbs overnight. Then they got into the switch/hub business and caused the port cost on those devices to drop as well. That allowed for an inflection point that revolutionized the availablity of networking.
The combined force of PCI plus 100Mbs ethernet and a massive price drop means almost every PC on the planet is shipped today comes with an Ethernet port.
The 40 buck Ethernet Switches today and dirt cheap LOMs and Adapter cards are thanks to Intel and its effect on making networking a commodity.

AppleTalk and LocalTalk

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you read that right, AppleTalk and LocalTalk changed networking more than Win2K server or some of the other things mentioned. AppleTalk had, way back before most of you whippersnappers were born, true plug-and-play networking for printers and file servers. Later it became a layer 3 routable protocol (and could be encapsulated in IP easily enough if you didn't want to route it directly), and it was never as "chatty" as all the MS-DOS morons would have you believe. LocalTalk used twisted pair wiring to get cheap physical networking before 10BaseT was finalized, was easy to set up, and it worked well. Best of all, neither required a server of any type, which was unusual for the time. In the days before IP was the default Layer 3 protocol, most other network options required some form of server for the clients to have any functionality at all, AppleTalk never did.

Minix

[metamatic]

Ignoring BSDs, Minix pre-dates Linux, and was fully open source.

It wasn't Free Software (TM), but it was open source.

Re:Typical article about technology from a journal

[leereyno]

Yes and Linux started out as a replacement kernel for Minix, yet I doubt anyone would say that Linux=Minix just as no one would say that Apache = NCSA httpd.

Linux mistake...

[evilviper]

From TFA: As the first completely open source operating system, [Linux] became the most dominant platform for innovative network products

Sorry guys, but BSD was, without any question, FIRST.

I do play oolite.

[jd]

There's some functions I'd like to see... ...but however good they made it, I'd be saying the same thing, so it's a pointless thing to say. :)

Seriously, oolite is a brilliant game and I wish it were better-known and better-circulated. Purely from a psychotic historical angle, I wish the coders could jury-rig Linux' framebuffers to do split-resolution screens, but that's not really so important these days.

Re:I do play oolite.

[Ahruman]

What's a split-resolution screen?

We're pretty responsive to feedback, although it's best given in the appropriate forum. This is, of course, no guarantee that we'll do anything about sugestions recieved. ;-)

Split resolution

[jd]

On the original computer Elite came out on, the BBC Micro, it was possible (through an ingenious piece of programming) to have the top half of the screen in a high resolution, two-colour mode, and the bottom half of the screen in a much lower, multi-colour mode. The upshot was that you had graphics that should, logically, have been impossible on a computer that small.

Re:Split resolution

[Ahruman]

Ahh, the wonders of hardware-bashing. But hey, Oolite's tagline is, "Retro space gaming with modern technology." :-)