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, an ...

. 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 university, Catholic research university in Notre Dame, Indiana, outside the city of South Bend, Indiana, South Bend. French priest Edward Sorin fo ...

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 o ...

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

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

, 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 Contributors

Mike Karels Linkedin Page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Karels, Michael J. American computer programmers American computer scientists BSD people Living people Year of birth missing (living people)