Systems Software & Protocols Operating systems, databases, networking — the substrate of modern computing, from MULTICS to Kubernetes
A mind map of the systems-software layer: programming languages and compilers; operating systems from batch through Unix to cloud; networking and the internet protocols; databases from hierarchical through relational to vector; virtualization, containers, and Kubernetes; the standards and organizations that made interoperability possible. Named pioneers, systems, and protocols with dates across six branches.
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Languages & Compilers Operating Systems Networking & the Internet Databases & Storage Virtualization, Containers & Cloud Standards & the Open-Source Commons Early language era C and Unix lineage languages Dynamic and scripting Managed runtimes Modern systems languages Compiler infrastructure Early time-sharing Unix and the lineage Linux Microsoft and Windows Apple lineage Mobile and embedded Packet switching TCP/IP Ethernet and local networks DNS and routing The Web Content delivery and cloud networking Hierarchical and network Relational NoSQL wave Analytics and warehouses Vector and graph Distributed systems foundations Virtualization lineage Containers Orchestration Public cloud Data platforms and observability DevOps and CI/CD Standards bodies Free + open-source licensing Package management Source control Foundations and collaboration models Protocol innovations Grace Hopper — A-0 compiler, 1952 FORTRAN — John Backus, IBM 704, 1957 LISP — John McCarthy, MIT 1958 ALGOL 60 — Naur, Dijkstra et al. COBOL — CODASYL committee, 1959 BNF — Backus-Naur Form, 1960 BCPL — Martin Richards, Cambridge 1967 B — Ken Thompson, Bell Labs 1969 C — Dennis Ritchie, Bell Labs 1972 K&R C — The C Programming Language book, 1978 ANSI C (C89) standard C++ — Bjarne Stroustrup, Bell Labs 1985 Objective-C — Brad Cox + Tom Love, 1984 Smalltalk — Alan Kay, Xerox PARC 1980 Perl — Larry Wall, 1987 Python — Guido van Rossum, 1991 Ruby — Yukihiro Matsumoto, 1995 PHP — Rasmus Lerdorf, 1995 JavaScript — Brendan Eich, 10 days, 1995 Lua — Brazil, 1993 Java — James Gosling, Sun 1995 JVM + HotSpot JIT C# — Anders Hejlsberg, Microsoft 2000 Scala — Martin Odersky, 2004 Kotlin — JetBrains, 2011 Swift — Chris Lattner + Apple, 2014 Go — Griesemer, Pike, Thompson, Google 2009 Rust — Graydon Hoare, Mozilla 2010 Zig — Andrew Kelley, 2016 Mojo — Chris Lattner, 2023 Ownership + borrow checker — Rust's core contribution LEX + YACC — Bell Labs 1970s GCC — Richard Stallman, 1987 LLVM — Chris Lattner, UIUC 2000 Clang — Apple, 2007 MLIR — Google, 2019 (multi-level IR) WebAssembly (Wasm) — W3C recommendation, 2019 CTSS — MIT, 1961 (compatible time-sharing system) MULTICS — MIT/Bell Labs/GE, 1964 ITS — MIT AI Lab, 1967 TENEX / TOPS-20 — BBN, 1969 Unix — Ken Thompson + Dennis Ritchie, Bell Labs 1969 BSD — Bill Joy, Berkeley 1977 System V — AT&T, 1983 Andrew Tanenbaum — MINIX, 1987 (educational) POSIX — IEEE Std 1003, 1988 Linus Torvalds — announces kernel, Aug 25 1991 GPL v2 license, 1992 Linux 1.0 released, Mar 1994 Red Hat founded, 1993; IPO 1999 Ubuntu — Canonical, 2004 Linux Foundation formed, 2007 Linux on 100% of top-500 supercomputers by 2017 MS-DOS — Microsoft, 1981 (from 86-DOS) Windows 1.0 — 1985 Windows 3.0 — 1990; Windows 95 Windows NT — Dave Cutler, 1993 WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), 2016 Classic Mac OS — 1984 NeXTSTEP — NeXT, 1989 Mac OS X — Darwin kernel, Mar 2001 iOS — iPhone OS 1.0, Jun 2007 Apple Silicon transition, 2020 (M1) Symbian — Nokia, 1998 (peak 2009) Android — Andy Rubin, 2003 (Google acquires 2005, launch 2008) RTOS (FreeRTOS, Zephyr) — embedded workhorses QNX — microkernel for automotive, medical Paul Baran — On Distributed Communications, RAND 1964 Donald Davies — independently, NPL UK 1965–1966 Leonard Kleinrock — queueing theory, MIT 1962 ARPANET — first message UCLA → SRI, Oct 29 1969 Vint Cerf + Bob Kahn — A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication, IEEE 1974 TCP/IP v4 defined, 1981 ARPANET flag day — TCP/IP cutover, Jan 1 1983 IPv6 — RFC 2460, 1998 QUIC — Google 2012; IETF RFC 9000, 2021 BBR congestion control — Google, 2016 Bob Metcalfe — Ethernet at Xerox PARC, 1973 Metcalfe's memo, May 22 1973 Ethernet standardized — IEEE 802.3, 1983 Wi-Fi (802.11) — 1997 5G — standardized 3GPP Release 15, 2018 DNS — Paul Mockapetris, RFC 882/883, 1983 BGP-4 — Internet routing, RFC 1654, 1994 NAT — RFC 1631, 1994 Anycast routing — used by CDNs RPKI — BGP origin authentication, 2011+ Tim Berners-Lee — proposal at CERN, Mar 1989 First web server + browser + page, Dec 1990 HTTP/0.9, HTTP/1.0 (RFC 1945, 1996) HTTP/1.1 — RFC 2616, 1999 HTTP/2 — RFC 7540, 2015 HTTP/3 over QUIC — RFC 9114, 2022 WebSocket — RFC 6455, 2011 W3C founded, 1994 Akamai — founded Tom Leighton + Danny Lewin, MIT 1998 Cloudflare — founded 2009 Fastly, AWS CloudFront, Google Cloud CDN Let's Encrypt — Apr 2016 (ACME) SpaceX Starlink constellation, 2019– IBM IMS — hierarchical, 1966 (still in production) Charles Bachman — IDS network model, 1964 (Turing 1973) CODASYL DBTG report, 1971 Edgar F. Codd — A Relational Model of Data, CACM 1970 Codd's 12 rules, 1985 System R — IBM San Jose, 1974 Ingres — Stonebraker, Berkeley 1974 Oracle V2 — Larry Ellison, 1979 SQL standardized — ANSI 1986 MySQL — Michael Widenius, 1995 PostgreSQL — Stonebraker's successor, 1986 SQLite — D. Richard Hipp, 2000 (most-deployed DB) Google Bigtable — OSDI 2006 Amazon Dynamo — SOSP 2007 Apache Cassandra — Facebook 2008 MongoDB — 10gen, 2009 Redis — Salvatore Sanfilippo, 2009 DynamoDB — AWS managed, 2012 NewSQL: CockroachDB (2015), Spanner (OSDI 2012) Ralph Kimball + Bill Inmon — data warehouse fathers Teradata — 1979; first parallel DBMS Vertica — Stonebraker, 2005 (columnar) Snowflake — founded 2012, IPO 2020 BigQuery — Google 2010; Redshift — AWS 2013 Databricks + Delta Lake, 2019 DuckDB — CWI Amsterdam, 2019 FAISS — Facebook 2017 (approximate nearest neighbor) pgvector — PostgreSQL extension, 2021 Pinecone, Weaviate, Milvus, Chroma — vector DBs Neo4j — graph database, 2007 HNSW — Malkov + Yashunin, 2016 (default ANN algorithm) Leslie Lamport — Time, Clocks, 1978 (logical clocks) Paxos — Lamport, 1989 Raft — Ongaro + Ousterhout, 2014 (Paxos' successor) CAP theorem — Eric Brewer keynote 2000 Two-phase commit (2PC), three-phase commit (3PC) IBM CP-40 / CP-67 / VM/370, 1967–1972 VMware — Rosenblum, Stanford 1998 Xen — Cambridge 2003 (AWS EC2 founding hypervisor) KVM — Linux kernel, 2007 AWS Nitro — custom silicon, 2017 Firecracker microVM — AWS, 2018 (Lambda engine) Chroot — Bill Joy, 1979 FreeBSD jails, 2000 Solaris Zones, 2004 LXC — 2008 Docker — Solomon Hykes, dotCloud → Docker Inc., Mar 2013 OCI spec, 2015 Podman — daemonless containers, Red Hat 2018 Google Borg — internal, since ~2003 Mesos — UC Berkeley 2010 Kubernetes — Google open-sourced, Jun 2014 CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation), 2015 Helm, Istio, Argo, Linkerd — K8s ecosystem Kubernetes 1.0 released, Jul 2015 AWS EC2 + S3 launch, 2006 Google App Engine, 2008; GCP broad launch 2011 Microsoft Azure, 2010 AWS Lambda — serverless, Nov 2014 Heroku — 2007 (PaaS) Cloudflare Workers — edge compute, 2017 Fly.io, Vercel, Netlify — modern hosting Hadoop — Doug Cutting, 2006 Apache Spark — Berkeley AMPLab 2009, 2014 Kafka — LinkedIn 2010 (streaming backbone) Prometheus — SoundCloud 2012 Grafana — 2014 OpenTelemetry — CNCF 2019 (metrics + logs + traces) Honeycomb, Datadog, New Relic — observability SaaS Jenkins — fork of Hudson, 2011 GitHub Actions, 2019 GitLab CI, 2015 Terraform — HashiCorp, 2014 Infrastructure-as-Code — Pulumi, CDK, CrossPlane SRE book — Google, 2016 Accelerate — Forsgren et al., 2018 (DORA metrics) ISO — International Organization for Standardization, 1947 IEEE — standards body, 1963 merger IETF — founded 1986; RFC process W3C — Tim Berners-Lee, 1994 ECMA International — JavaScript standard (ES2015+) Unicode Consortium, 1991 Jon Postel — "Postel's Law," IANA founder Richard Stallman — GNU Project launch, Sep 27 1983 GPL v1, 1989; GPL v2, 1991; GPL v3, 2007 MIT License, BSD License — permissive Apache License 2.0, 2004 Mozilla Public License Eric Raymond — The Cathedral and the Bazaar, 1997 OSI (Open Source Initiative) founded, 1998 CPAN (Perl), 1995 RubyGems, 2004 npm — Node Package Manager, 2010 PyPI + pip Homebrew — macOS, 2009 Cargo — Rust, 2014 pnpm, Yarn, Bun — modern npm alternatives Supply-chain security: SLSA, Sigstore, 2020+ RCS — Walter Tichy, 1982 CVS — 1986 Subversion (SVN), 2000 Git — Linus Torvalds, Apr 2005 GitHub founded, Apr 10 2008 GitLab (2011), Bitbucket, Codeberg Microsoft acquires GitHub, Jun 2018 ($7.5B) Apache Software Foundation, 1999 Linux Foundation, 2007 CNCF, 2015 Eclipse Foundation, 2004 Rust Foundation, 2021 GitHub Copilot — Jun 2021 (AI-pair-programming era) OpenSSF (Open Source Security Foundation), 2020 SMTP — RFC 821, 1982 FTP — RFC 959, 1985 SSH — Tatu Ylönen, 1995 MCP (Model Context Protocol) — Anthropic, Nov 2024 gRPC — Google open-source, 2015 GraphQL — Facebook open-source, 2015 OAuth 2.0 — RFC 6749, 2012; OIDC 2014 Systems Software & Protocols Brian Tighe · Mind Maps Orbital mind map. Scroll to zoom, drag to pan, or use the buttons above (+ / − / 0 keys also work). Hover a node to highlight its path to the center and the subtree beneath it. How to read this The center holds the topic. The six branches fan out bilaterally — three on each side — each in its own color. Sub-branches nest three levels deep under each top-level branch. Hover a leaf to trace the path back to the center; hover a branch to see everything it contains.
This is the shape the topic has when you try to hold the whole field in your head at once. It is not an argument; it is a scaffold. The essays argue against or within scaffolds like this one.