Hooray for the Sockets Interface
This article traces the history of the BSD sockets interface, which standardized network communication for UNIX systems in 1983. It highlights how this innovation enabled the modern, network-dependent computing environment.
Why it matters
The sockets interface is a foundational technology that underpins almost all modern internet communication.
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.
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