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Readings are also listed by session.

Class Notes

Saltzer, Jerome H., and M. Frans Kaashoek. Principles of Computer System Design. (6.033 class notes, draft release 2.0, MIT, February 2005.)

Textbook

Brooks, Frederick P., Jr. The Mythical Man-Month. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995. ISBN: 0201835959. (This book is primarily used at the end of the term. The 1974 edition is also usable in 6.033.)

Papers

Introduction to Computer Systems

Gabriel, Richard P. "The Rise of 'Worse is better'." On-line version of "Worse is Better". LISP: Good News, Bad News, How to Win BIG, AI Expert 6, no. 6 (June 1991): 33-35.

Simon, Herbert A. "The Architecture of Complexity." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 106, no. 6 (December 1962): 467-482. Republished as The Sciences of the Artificial. Part 4. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969, pp. 84-118. ISBN: 02621910516 (hardbound). ISBN: 0262690233 (paperback).

Gopen, George D., and Judith A. Swan. "The Science of Scientific Writing." American Scientist 78, no. 6 (November-December 1990): 550-558.

Leveson, Nancy G., and Clark S. Turner. "An Investigation of the Therac-25 Accidents." Computer 26, no. 7 (July 1993): 18-41.

Computer System Organization

Ritchie, Dennis M., and Ken L. Thompson. "The UNIX Time-sharing System." Bell System Technical Journal 57, no. 6, part 2 (1978): 1905-1930.

Scheifler, Robert, and Jim Gettys. "The X Window System." ACM Transactions on Graphics 5, no. 2 (April 1986): 79-109.

Pai, Vivek S., Peter Druschel, and Willy Zwaenepoel. "Flash: An Efficient and Portable Web Server." Proc of 1999 Annual Usenix Technical Conference. Monterey, CA, June 1999, pp. 199-212.

Dean, Jeffrey, and Sanjay Ghemawat. "MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters." Proc 6th Symp on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI). San Francisco, CA, December 2004.

Networking

Metcalfe, Robert M., and David R. Boggs. "Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks." Communications of the ACM 19, no. 7 (July 1976): 395-404.

Saltzer, J. H., D. P. Reed and D. D. Clark. "End-to-end Arguments in System Design." ACM Trans on Computer Systems 2, no. 4 (November 1984): 277-288.

Balakrishnan, Hari. "An Introduction to Wide-Area Internet Routing." 6.033 Case Study. MIT, January 2004.

Sandberg, Russell, David Goldberg, Steve Kleiman, Dan Walsh, and Bob Lyon. "Design and Implementation of the Sun Network Filesystem." Proc of the 1985 Summer Usenix Technical Conference. El Cerrito, CA, June 1985, pp. 119-130.

Huston, Geoff. "Anatomy: A Look Inside Network Address Translators." The Internet Protocol Journal 7, no. 3 (September 2004): 2-32.

Failure Recovery, Coordination, and Atomicity

Rosenblum, Mendel, and John K. Ousterhout. "The Design and Implementation of a Log-structured File System." Proceedings of the Thirteenth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. Pacific Grove, CA, October 13-16, 1991, pp. 1-15. Published as Operating Systems Review 25, no. 5 (1991). Also appeared in ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 10, no. 1 (February 1992): 26-52.

Petroski, Henry. "Engineering: History and failure." American Scientist 80, no. 6 (November-December 1992): 523-526.

Gray, Jim, Paul McJones, Bruce Lindsay, Raymond Lorie, Tom Price, Franco Putzolu, and Irving Traiger. "The Recovery Manager of the System R Database Manager." ACM Computing Surveys 13, no. 2 (June 1981): 223-242.

Plauger, Phillip J., "Chocolate." Embedded Systems Programming 7, no. 3 (March 1994): 81-84.

Security

Thompson, Ken. "Reflections on Trusting Trust." Communications of the ACM 27, no. 8 (August 1984): 761-763.

Anderson, Ross J. "Why Cryptosystems Fail." Proceedings of the 1993 ACM Conference in Computer and Communications Security. 1993, pp. 32-40.

Handley, Mark. "Internet Denial of Service Considerations," Internet Engineering Task Force, (January 9 2004).

Saltzer, Jerome H. "Slammer: An urgent wake-up call." In Andrew Herbert and Karen Spärck Jones, editors.Computer Systems:Theory, technology and applications, A tribute to Roger Needham. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag, 2003. ISBN: 0387218211. (E-Book format).

More Complexity

Lampson, Butler W. "Hints for Computer System Design." Proceedings of the Ninth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. Bretton Woods, NH, October 10-13, 1983, pp. 33-48. Published as Operating Systems Review 17, no. 5 (1983).

Readings by Session