Why BSD is less popular than Linux
Different licence obligations and community sizes helped to explain why Linux spread more widely than BSD.
Read the full postBlog 1999
9 posts
Projects, Linux, networks, systems, finds and internet standards from 1999.
Patch to close an Excel security hole
In 1999 Microsoft released a patch of almost 3 MB for an Excel hole through which attackers could delete files on the hard disk. The cause was a bug in the database driver, triggered by spreadsheets from emails or websites, against which macro virus protection was useless. Excel 97 and 2000 were affected, although Microsoft’s German pages declared Office 2000 safe.
Read the full postEight-way Intel against Unix servers
In 1999 Compaq and more than 20 other PC makers wanted to attack the Unix RISC systems of Sun, IBM and HP with eight-way Intel servers running Windows NT. They were based on the Profusion chipset with a crossbar switch from Intel’s acquisition Corollary; earlier attempts such as Axil’s Pentium Pro server had failed. heise saw the weak point at Microsoft: nobody trusted NT 4.0 to meet the demands of large data centres.
Read the full postA new Amiga with a Transmeta CPU and Linux?
In August 1999 ClieNT Server NEWS reported that Amiga was considered the first OEM customer of the mysterious company Transmeta. Amiga spoke of a “very exciting” CPU for the Amiga MCC, which was to run a slimmed-down Linux and execute classic Amiga programs. Little more was known about Transmeta at the time than Linus Torvalds’ answer “Cool stuff” and a patent that pointed to the emulation of arbitrary instruction sets.
Read the full postRFC 2616: HTTP/1.1: Persistent connections and caching
RFC 2616 brought HTTP/1.1 together and shaped persistent connections, caching and virtual hosts on the web. RFC 2616 was superseded by RFC 7230. HTTP performance depends heavily on connection and cache behaviour.
Read the full postFirewalling I
The talk explains firewall rules that protect internal systems and deliberately limit outgoing network use.
Read the full postLinux kernel 2.2.0 finally completed
In January 1999, after almost two years of development, Linus Torvalds released Linux kernel 2.2.0. The most important new feature was considerably better support for multiprocessor systems, among other things through better handling of Intel’s APIC and shared resources. There were also IPv6, Video4Linux for TV cards such as the BT848, and the now integrated Open Sound System.
Read the full postPSINet: largest internet fibre network in Europe
In 1999 the internet carrier PSINet announced that it would build the largest fibre network for internet traffic in Europe, more than 21,000 kilometres long and connecting 30 metropolitan areas. The cities were to be linked by several fibre rings so that operation would continue if individual routes failed. Initially three rings at 155 Mbit/s were planned, later at least 620 Mbit/s instead of the previous 34 Mbit/s.
Read the full postRio software for Linux
In January 1999 two independent programmers published a tool that allowed the Diamond Rio MP3 player to be loaded under Linux as well. Until then this had only been possible with the original software under Windows. The program could also store arbitrary files on the player and was only available as source code.
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