MIPS Architecture
The clean RISC instruction set that grew out of John Hennessy's Stanford MIPS project and MIPS Computer Systems, widely used in workstations, game consoles, and computer architecture teaching.
Standards
The specifications that pinned the languages down - each tied to the standards body that issued it.
105 entries, all primary-sourced
Server-Sent Events
A WHATWG-standardized mechanism for a server to push a one-way stream of updates to a browser over HTTP, exposed through the EventSource API and the text/event-stream format.
The Contributor Covenant
A standardized code of conduct for open-source projects, written by Coraline Ada Ehmke in 2014, that sets explicit expectations for respectful behavior and a graduated enforcement ladder; it became the most widely adopted code of conduct in open source and the focus of a lasting culture debate.
Web Components
A set of browser-native web platform standards for building reusable, encapsulated UI components: Custom Elements, Shadow DOM, and HTML templates.
WebSocket
An IETF protocol (RFC 6455, 2011) for full-duplex communication between a client and server over a single TCP connection, established by upgrading an HTTP handshake.
ANSI Escape Codes (ECMA-48 / ISO 6429)
ANSI escape codes are in-band control sequences, introduced by the ESC character, that direct a terminal to move the cursor, set colors and text attributes, and clear or scroll the screen. They are standardized as ECMA-48, equivalently ANSI X3.64 and ISO/IEC 6429.
Ethernet
The dominant wired local-area network technology, invented at Xerox PARC in 1973, first published in 1976, and standardized as IEEE 802.3.
XMODEM
Ward Christensen's simple file-transfer protocol, written in 1977, that sends a file as numbered 128-byte blocks each protected by a checksum, with the receiver acknowledging good blocks and requesting retransmission of bad ones. It became the standard way to move files over modem links and the ancestor of YMODEM and ZMODEM.
x86
x86 is the instruction-set architecture that grew from the Intel 8086, extended to 32-bit and then 64-bit; it became the dominant desktop and server ISA, held together by strict backward compatibility.
Usenet
The distributed discussion system of newsgroups born in 1980, whose message format was standardized in RFC 850 and RFC 1036, and whose culture gave the world flame wars and 'the September that never ended.'
UDP (User Datagram Protocol)
A minimal, connectionless transport protocol that sends datagrams with almost no overhead and no delivery guarantees. Defined by Jon Postel in RFC 768 (28 August 1980), it underpins DNS, streaming media, gaming, and modern protocols like QUIC.
TCP/IP
The internet protocol suite combining the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol, specified in RFC 791 and RFC 793, which together define how data moves reliably across interconnected networks.
DVI (DeVice Independent)
The device-independent page-description output format produced by Donald Knuth's TeX, describing typeset pages without reference to any particular printer.
SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol)
The application protocol that mail servers use to relay electronic mail from a sender's host to a recipient's host, defined by Jon Postel in RFC 821 in 1982 and modernized in RFC 5321.
MIDI
The Musical Instrument Digital Interface, a 1983 hardware and protocol standard that lets electronic instruments and computers exchange note and control data, maintained by the MIDI Manufacturers Association.
OSI Reference Model
The Open Systems Interconnection seven-layer reference model standardized by ISO as ISO/IEC 7498, structuring network communication into physical, data link, network, transport, session, presentation, and application layers.
PostScript
Adobe's stack-based page-description programming language, introduced in 1984, that drove laser printers and imagesetters and made desktop publishing possible.
ARM (Architecture)
The power-efficient RISC instruction-set architecture that began as the Acorn RISC Machine in 1985 and, through a pure IP-licensing model, came to dominate mobile, embedded, and increasingly servers and Macs.
FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
One of the oldest application protocols on the internet, FTP transfers files between hosts; it traces back to RFC 114 in 1971 and was given its long-standing definition in RFC 959 in 1985.
SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language)
SGML is the ISO 8879 meta-language for defining markup languages by declaring document structure separately from content. Standardized in 1986 and rooted in Charles Goldfarb's earlier GML work, it is the common ancestor of HTML and XML.
RTF (Rich Text Format)
RTF is Microsoft's plain-text interchange format for formatted documents, encoding fonts, styles, tables, and images as ASCII control words inside braces. Introduced in 1987, it was for years the lingua franca for moving styled text between applications and operating systems.
SPARC
The RISC instruction-set architecture introduced by Sun Microsystems in 1987, derived from the Berkeley RISC project, known for its register windows and later released as an open specification.
DNS (Domain Name System)
The hierarchical, distributed system that maps human-readable names like example.com to IP addresses. Defined by Paul Mockapetris in RFC 1034 and RFC 1035 (November 1987), building on his earlier RFC 882/883 (1983).
POSIX
The IEEE POSIX standard, first published in 1988, defines a portable operating-system interface so software written for one Unix-like system can run on another.
The BSD License Family
A family of short permissive licenses from the Berkeley Software Distribution, ranging from the original 4-clause form through the 3-clause New BSD and 2-clause Simplified BSD variants; the dropped advertising clause is its defining historical episode.
The MIT License
A short, permissive, attribution-only software license originating at MIT and also known as the Expat License; it has become the single most widely used open source license.
IRC (Internet Relay Chat)
Jarkko Oikarinen's real-time text chat protocol from 1988, documented in RFC 1459, which hosted developer communities, open-source projects, and online culture for decades.
ANSI C (X3.159-1989 / ISO/IEC 9899:1990)
The first official standard for the C programming language, published by ANSI in 1989 as X3.159-1989 and adopted by ISO in 1990 as ISO/IEC 9899:1990.
The GNU General Public License (GPL)
The canonical copyleft software license from the GNU Project, whose reciprocal terms guarantee that recipients of a covered program keep the freedom to run, study, share, and modify it.
GIF
CompuServe's Graphics Interchange Format, an LZW-compressed palette-indexed raster format with animation support, whose reliance on the patented LZW algorithm triggered a major patent controversy in the 1990s.
DocBook
DocBook is an SGML, and later XML, vocabulary designed for writing technical documentation such as books and software manuals, with a single source rendered to many output formats. Created in 1991 and long maintained by OASIS, it pioneered single-source publishing.
HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol)
The request/response protocol that carries documents between web clients and servers, from the minimal HTTP/0.9 to RFC-defined HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1.
POWER / Power ISA
The RISC architecture born from IBM's POWER and the AIM (Apple-IBM-Motorola) PowerPC alliance of the 1990s, later unified and opened as the royalty-free Power ISA maintained by the OpenPOWER Foundation.
MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions)
The standard that lets email carry attachments, non-ASCII text, and typed content by labeling message parts with content types; defined in RFC 1341 in 1992 and later reused by HTTP and the Web.
The POSIX Shell (Shell Command Language)
The Shell Command Language defined in IEEE Std 1003.1 (POSIX) is the portable specification of the sh command interpreter. It standardizes the Bourne-derived shell grammar that every sh-compatible shell, including Bash, Dash, and ksh, must follow for scripts to run across systems.
OpenGL
The cross-platform graphics API derived from Silicon Graphics' IRIS GL, first released in 1992, governed by the OpenGL Architecture Review Board and later the Khronos Group.
MPEG
The Moving Picture Experts Group and its foundational audio/video standards MPEG-1 (ISO/IEC 11172) and MPEG-2 (ISO/IEC 13818), which defined digital video and audio coding for CD-ROM, DVD, and broadcast television.
JPEG
The Joint Photographic Experts Group lossy still-image compression standard, based on the discrete cosine transform, standardized as ITU-T Recommendation T.81 and ISO/IEC 10918-1.
PDF (Portable Document Format)
Adobe's fixed-layout document format, derived from PostScript and introduced in 1993, standardized internationally as ISO 32000 in 2008.
MP3
MPEG-1/2 Audio Layer III, a perceptual audio coding format developed within the MPEG process and largely at Fraunhofer, standardized as part of ISO/IEC 11172-3, that made compressed music practical and reshaped the recording industry.
DirectX
Microsoft's family of multimedia and game APIs for Windows, including Direct3D, DirectDraw, and DirectSound, first released in 1995 to make Windows a viable platform for high-performance games.
IPv6 (Internet Protocol Version 6)
The successor to IPv4, expanding addresses from 32 bits to 128 bits to escape address exhaustion. First specified by Steve Deering and Robert Hinden in RFC 1883 (December 1995), revised by RFC 2460 (1998), and made the current Internet Standard by RFC 8200 (July 2017).
POP3 and IMAP (Mail Retrieval Protocols)
The two protocols a mail client uses to fetch messages from a server: POP3, which downloads mail to one device, and IMAP, which keeps mailboxes on the server and synchronizes across devices.
OpenType
The cross-platform font format jointly developed by Microsoft and Adobe from 1996, building on TrueType to hold both TrueType and PostScript Type 1 outlines plus advanced typographic layout features.
PNG
Portable Network Graphics, a lossless raster image format created as a patent-free replacement for GIF, specified in IETF RFC 2083 and later as a W3C Recommendation and ISO/IEC standard.
ECMAScript (ECMA-262)
The Ecma International standard, ECMA-262, that defines the JavaScript language; its first edition was published in June 1997.
Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11)
Wireless LAN technology standardized as IEEE 802.11 in 1997, with the Wi-Fi Alliance later supplying the consumer brand and interoperability certification that made wireless networking ubiquitous.
Debian Free Software Guidelines
Debian's 1997 set of ten criteria defining what software qualifies as free; reused almost verbatim, they became the Open Source Definition.