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

[Bernie Cosell]

On 11 Apr 2013 at 19:44, Larry Sheldon wrote:

> For sure I think Unix was a major component of the early layers of the
> snowball that is The Internet--but I thought the initial development was
> done on IBMish and special purpose hardware--did the IMP's have an OS?
> And don't VAXen speak VMS (everyone I ever met did).

Oh boy, are you going to get a lot of replies to this.  In the sense that 
you're using the term, the IMP did *not* have an OS.  It was a 
special-purpose real-time system that acted as the switching nodes for 
the ARPAnet and the interface for the Host systems.

One of the early plans was to get as many *DIFFERENT* Host systems 
connected up to the ARPAnet and, of course, talking to one another.  I 
think the Sigma-7 at UCLA talking to SAIL at Stanford.  I think the only 
IBM system on the early net was a 360/67 at Rand (??).   MIT had ITS and 
Multics.  BBN had all sorts of systems: BSD's, TENEX's, assorted PDP-11 
systems.  Even the PDP-1 Exec III was an ARPAnet host..:o)

The VAXen on the early network were running BSD [Unix].   When did 
someone build a TCP/IP stack for VMS?

  /Bernie\

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Bernie Cosell                     Fantasy Farm Fibers
mailto:bernie at fantasyfarm.com     Pearisburg, VA
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