[ih] Historical fiction

[Jack Haverty]

On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 6:57 AM, Miles Fidelman
<mfidelman at meetinghouse.net> wrote:

> Now this could have been just a story, but... this was the same period where
> John Donovan taught an introductory programming course, jointly between the
> EE/Computer Science Dept. and the Sloan School.  The first problem set we
> delivered on punch cards, for execution on a 360, the second we ran
> terminals via 360/TSO, the third on MULTICS.  At least for the 360 problem
> sets, we had to wrap the jobs in JCL statements that invoked a grading
> test/grading program.  Notable among the instructions was something along
> the lines of 'you can try to hack the grading program - if you succeed in
> giving yourself an A on the problem set, it sticks, if we detect the hack,
> you get an F.'  Kind of suggests that the admin folks' paranoia, if real,
> would have been more than justified. :-)

True story.  I took Donovan's course, aka "6.251", in 1967 at MIT,
when the venue was the
IBM 7094.  It wasn't really "introductory programming", but had a name
like "Systems
Programming".  Donovan (and TA Stu Madnick) explicitly laid out the rules - you
could either write code to do the assigned task, or write code to infiltrate the
grading program.  Everything was in Assembler of course - "FAP" or
"Fortran Assembly
Program".  As far as I can remember, no one tried to hack the grading program,
probably because it was just easier to do the actual assignment.  But
we thought about it...

I doubt there was much concern of hacking school administration data
which probably
weren't even online (tapes mounted) at the same time.  However, the
years after 1967
got to be pretty wild, with campus protests and such even at MIT, so
by the 70s there
may have been justified paranoia.

Besides, it was apparently much more interesting to hack TPC - The
Phone Company. This
was the era of the "blue boxes" and such too.

Aaah, JCL...  //EXEC and all that stuff.  Memories....getting hazier...

/Jack
[MIT 1966-1971 as student, 1971-1978 staff]