[ih] What is the origin of the root account?

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net>

    > Do I recall correctly that at least one of the early "reference
    > implementations" was written for Unix

Not sure we had the concept of "reference implementations" back then. Yes, we
did look at other implementations some when we went to do new ones, but none
we hallowed above others.

    > with portions of it remaining in BSD Unix to this day?

Not the earliest Unix implementations; they were all for V6 PDP-11 Unix.

The two earliest were one from U Illinois (or some place like - John Day did
it, IIRC), and slightly later, one from BBN (Jack Haverty wrote that one).

After that, MIT did one (Liza Martin did much of the code, but it was broken
up in an odd way - only the demux was in the kernel, and the TCP was with the
application in a user process, and different apps could (and in some cases
did) have different TCPs. (Really!) So User Telnet used a shift register for
an output buffer (which made sense for that application), but FTP didn't.

	Noel