This blog will talk about two technologies were invented before the creation of the Web one of them has succeeded to pass the time and the other couldn't and became obsolete.
Unix:
"Need is the mother of innovation" Bell labs needed their own operating system instead of using the one provided by Multics at 1964(1). That encouraged Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna at Bell labs to start developing an operating system on their own. It first started with Thompson working on a used PDP-7 computer to test on it(2). Step by step The first UNIX kernel was born with file system was suggested by the Multics I/O system and a set of very simple set of commands, an editor and an assembler.
Ritchie describes how Thompson's PDP-7 assembler was a model of simplicity. "There were no libraries, no loader or link editor," he writes, "the entire source of a program was presented to the assembler, and the output file -- with a fixed name -- that emerged was directly executable."(3) Once the assembler was completed, "the system was able to support itself. And thus the operating system we now call UNIX was born," notes Ritchie.(4).
It's amazing how this widely used operating system started with very simple steps and capabilities. The story continues with getting an advanced computer with the promise to create a text processing system. They copied an old program and translate it and it became the assembler for this new computer PDP-11 by 1971. Now the journey of upgrading this OS continue with creating pipes by 1972 and adding more tools like grep by 1973.
One of the main reasons UNIX had a great development cycle and improvements coming fast is being open source and handling the tapes for anyone wants to use it and participate into the development of the project. Pioneers like Henry Spencer describe how important it was to those in the Unix community to have the source code. He elaborates: Well, for one thing, Usenet predated a lot of company bbs's and the like. It was basically a cheap way to hear about things fast and this was at a time when practically every UNIX site had complete sources and so a bug report often came with a fix. It was a way of finding out what people had discovered and what fixes they'd worked out for it. Quickly and easily. And for that matter, if you ran into something that you couldn't solve yourself, putting out an inquiry to a bunch of fairly bright people who were fairly familiar with the code, often got a response, `O Yeah. We solved that one' or `You're right. There's a bug. Here's how to fix it' or sympathy even if no one had a fix for it."(5) After that the growth of the OS increased untill In the 1990s, Unix and Unix-like systems grew in popularity and became the operating system of choice for over 90% of the world's top 500 fastest supercomputers. (6)
Currently UNIX is used everywhere and is the base for a lot of distributions with changing the kernel based on the preferences of the company and it became even more popular with the kernel made by Linus Trovald called Linux and the only competitor for it is Windows. It's used in Android and apple smartphones, Mac products, BSD, Linux and more which indicates the importance of UNIX in our lives.
Telnet:
When I first entered the CISCO lab and created a small network between devices the first tool I used to test connections between them is by using telnet. Telnet is a client-server protocol, based on a reliable connection-oriented transport. Typically, this protocol is used to establish a connection to Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) port number 23, where a Telnet server application (telnetd) is listening. Telnet, however, predates TCP/IP and was originally run over Network Control Program (NCP) protocols.(7)
It was used mainly in academic institutions and private departments at first but the problem came when the web came and security became an issue. telnet wasn't made secure at first because people didn't have security as a concern anyway but when hackers arose and starting exploiting the vulnerable technologies telnet was one of them for giving a terminal access to other computers.
Security issues:
1- Telnet simply doesn't encrypt connections so it means that any man in the middle attack would succeed and get information even passwords from this connection
2- It doesn't have authentecation.
For these reasons and more experts in computer security, such as SANS Institute, recommend that the use of Telnet for remote logins should be discontinued under all normal circumstances.(8)
(1) "Interview with Victor Vyssotsky," Unix Review, January, 1985, p. 60.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Dennis M. Ritchie, "The Evolution of the UNIX Time-sharing
System, AT&T Bell Labs Technical Journal, vol 63 no 8,
part 2, October, 1984, p. 1578.
(5) "Interview with Henry Spencer," p. 4.
(6) "Operating system Family - Systems share". Top 500 project
(7) Telnet-wiki
(8) Ibid
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