Article URL: https://blog.apnic.net/2026/07/28/hooray-for-the-sockets-interface/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49092754 Points: 13 # Comments: 7

Don’t forget the BBN TCP/IP implementation for BSD that predated Joy’s code (and was used to kickstart his code). See for example klarasystems.com/articles/history-of-freebsd-part-4-bsd-and-tcp-ip/ For a few years at BBN in the mid-1990s, I “owned” a master copy of the magtapes with the source code. If anyone requested a copy from BBN, I was tasked to copy the tapes and send them out — to meet a DARPA contract obligation. No one asked during my time 🙁 In 1983, the University of California, Berkeley campus (UCB) released version 4.2 of its UNIX operating system, the Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD). For many people, this is the ‘epoch event’ that defines the birth of online services, because it is the version that released the BSD ‘sockets’ model of networking into the world. In effect, the ‘right place, right time’ combined for computing systems and an operating system to run on them. This led to a massive increase in access to network services worldwide. The installation of this first ubiquitous network approach was by tape, which you got in the mail. To modern eyes, this may seem strange, given that modern operating system installation is most often a network-driven event. If you do not download a full ISO image or bootable VMDK disk image from the network, you tend to download a smaller system that bootstraps from the network. This is normal — the network is assumed. Back in the 1980s, while ‘a network’ might exist, it was both too narrow — dial-up telephone at speeds as low as 1200 or 2400 baud — and lacked common protocols to specify how to find and fetch content. Even if you had access to ‘the network’, it was difficult to reliably retrieve something like the binary code of a new operating system. It looked different almost everywhere. Sockets are a large part of the story that changed this. After sockets, networked UNIX systems began to look broadly consistent. We arrived at a more standardized model of network access. Prior versions of BSD for PDP-11 minicomputers, dating back to 1978, had been released to the research community worldwide on tape: 30 copies of the code for version 1, and 75 copies for version 2. The system was released under a licence issued on behalf of ‘the Regents of the University of California’, and it carefully limited liability and user rights. You received the code in the post on a reel of tape.