Michael J. (Mike) Karels is an American Software Engineer and one of the key people in history of
BSD
The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...
UNIX
Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...
.
A graduate of
University of Notre Dame
The University of Notre Dame du Lac, known simply as Notre Dame ( ) or ND, is a private Catholic research university in Notre Dame, Indiana, outside the city of South Bend. French priest Edward Sorin founded the school in 1842. The main campu ...
with a
Bachelor of Science
A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years.
The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University of ...
in Microbiology. Mike went on to
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
for his advanced degree in Microbiology.
Mike had access to the department's computer and since the administrator of that PDP-11 did not have enough time, Mike started helping him and then making changes to the system.
Mike started his contribution to Unix with the 2.9BSD release, distributed for the PDP-11.
When Mike saw a job posting with the
Computer Systems Research Group in the
BSD
The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...
project, he decided to jump in.
In 1982, Mike took over
Bill Joy's responsibilities when Mr. Joy left CSRG, and was the system architect for 4.3BSD, the most important BSD release and the base of the development for a number of commercial Unix flavors available today, including Solaris. This release was introduced to the world in deep detail through the all-time famous book, The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System, with black cover and smiling beastie. Mike was a CSRG principal programmer for 8 years.
Mike worked closely with
Van Jacobson
Van Jacobson (born 1950) is an American computer scientist, renowned for his work on TCP/IP network performance and scaling. on a number of widely accepted algorithms
in TCP implementation. Including the
Jacobson/Karels algorithm
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) uses a network congestion-avoidance algorithm that includes various aspects of an additive increase/multiplicative decrease (AIMD) scheme, along with other schemes including slow start and congestion windo ...
TCP slow start and the routing radix tree are probably the most famous ones.
Mike spends little time taking credit for this work, and on the other hand, uses every opportunity to mention the names of people who had in one way or other some role or contribution to the TCP/IP implementation in Unix.
In 1993, the
USENIX Association gave a Lifetime Achievement Award (''Flame'') to the
Computer Systems Research Group at
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
, honoring 180 individuals, including Karels, who contributed to the CSRG's
4.4BSD-Lite release.
Later, Mike moved to BSDi (
Berkeley Software Design
Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDI or, later, BSDi), was a corporation which developed, sold licenses for, and supported BSD/OS (originally known as BSD/386), a commercial and partially proprietary variant of the BSD Unix operating system for ...
) and designed BSD/OS, which was, for years, the only commercially available BSD style Unix on Intel platform. BSD/OS is a very reliable OS platform designed for Internet services. BSDi software asset was bought by
Wind River in April 2001, and Mike joined Wind River as the Principal Technologist for the BSD/OS platform.
In 2009, Mike was Sr Principal Engineer at
McAfee
McAfee Corp. ( ), formerly known as McAfee Associates, Inc. from 1987 to 1997 and 2004 to 2014, Network Associates Inc. from 1997 to 2004, and Intel Security Group from 2014 to 2017, is an American global computer security software company head ...
. In 2015 he worked for Intel and later for Forcepoint LLC.
Bibliography
* S. Leffler, M. McKusick, M. Karels, J. Quarterman: ''The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System'', Addison-Wesley, January 1989, . German translation published June 1990, . Japanese translation published June 1991, (out of print).
* S. Leffler, M. McKusick: ''The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System Answer Book'', Addison-Wesley, April 1991, . Japanese translation published January 1992,
* M. McKusick, K. Bostic, M. Karels, J. Quarterman: ''The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System'', Addison-Wesley, April 1996, . French translation published 1997, International Thomson Publishing, Paris, France, .
References
External links
Mike Karels at Unix Guru Universe's Unix ContributorsMike Karels Linkedin Page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Karels, Michael J.
American computer programmers
American computer scientists
BSD people
Living people
Year of birth missing (living people)