[ih] Origin of 'talk' command

Lyndon Nerenberg lyndon at orthanc.ab.ca
Thu Dec 19 16:01:00 PST 2002


>I can't recall if it was talk, or the networked version of write, that had
>the incredible misfeature that if you said "[talk/write] all" it attempted
>to contact all hosts in /etc/hosts -- that caused provoked an interesting
>reaction from DARPA when someone accidentally did it with a full host
>table, c. 1988.

I recall this as being an invocation of rwall with a widely scoped IP
broadcast address as the "host" (something like 'rwall 10.255.255.255'
-- or were we still using zero's-broadcast at that time?).

--lyndon



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