The Defense Department's contract for the first production TCP/IP stack went to a Unix development group because the Unix in question was largely open source. Besides TCP/IP, Unix has become the one indispensable core technology of the Internet Service Provider industry. Ever since the demise of the TOPS family of operating systems in the mid-1980s, most Internet server machines (and effectively all above the PC level) have relied on Unix.
Not even Microsoft's awesome marketing clout has been able to dent Unix's lock on the Internet. While the TCP/IP standards (on which the Internet is based) evolved under TOPS-10 and are theoretically separable from Unix, attempts to make them work on other operating systems have been bedeviled by incompatibilities, instabilities, and bugs. The theory and specifications are available to anyone, but the engineering tradition to make them into a solid and working reality exists only in the Unix world.[7]
The Internet technical culture and the Unix culture began to merge in the early 1980s, and are now inseparably symbiotic. The design of the World Wide Web, the modern face of the Internet, owes as much to Unix as it does to the ancestral ARPANET. In particular, the concept of the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) so central to the Web is a generalization of the Unix idea of one uniform file namespace everywhere. To function effectively as an Internet expert, an understanding of Unix and its culture are indispensable.
