50 years ago today, on 7 April 1969, the very first “Request for Comments” (RFC) document was published. Titled simply “Host Software”, RFC 1 was written by Steve Crocker to document how packets would be sent from computer to computer in what was then the very early ARPANET.

Well-structured introduction to Systems thinking.

Today, Unix and its derivatives make up the majority of operating systems currently in use and its popularity continues to spread as the popularity of open-source software grows. All thanks to Kenneth Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and their fellow rebellious Bell Labs colleagues, who—by refusing to watch their beloved Multics die—ensured that their Unix operating system would go on to run the world.

Today’s software systems are arguably robust at logging and recovering from fail-stop hardware – there is a clear,binary signal that is fairly easy to recognize a and interpret. We believe fail-slow hardware is a fundamentally harder problem to solve. It is very hard to distinguish such cases from ones that are caused by software performance issues. It is also evident that many modern,advanced deployed systems do not anticipate this failure mode. We hope that our study can influence vendors, operators, and systems designers to treat fail-slow hardware as a separate class of failures and start addressing them more robustly in future systems.