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

[Dave Crocker]

On 4/11/2013 5:44 PM, Larry Sheldon wrote:
> r 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).


Larry:

    1. Arpanet = IMPs.  Internet = routers running on various hardware 
including unices.  Yes, IMPS had their own "o/s" but that doesn't matter 
for this thread.

    2. Within the computer science community, the originally-popular 
network-friendly platform was a DEC-10, running BBN's Tenex (which 
eventually became DEC's Tops-20 o/s.  Then came Unix on DEC hardware 
(initially PDP-11s and then Vaxen.[*]

    3. Within the Arpanet community, DEC hardware running DEC's o/s was 
close to non-existent, I believe.  Within the early Internet I believe 
is was quite rare.  DEC didn't offer a TCP/IP stack until somewhere 
close to 1990.  Before that the stack for VMS came from third-parties, 
mostly the one I managed for awhile at Wollongong.


d/

[*] DEC was willing to sell raw hardware, of course, but they didn't 
like missing out on the o/s sale.  But they had a group for writing unix 
device drivers, in support of Unix sales, although the Unix sofware and 
license came from AT&T.  User kept asking whether they could do one-stop 
shopping for hardware and software and the lead DEC guy, Armando 
Stettner, got really frustrated at constantly having to say that DEC did 
not offer a Unix license.  Finally came the first sizable Usenix 
meeting, in Santa Monica.  A few hundred folk.  Armando gets up to give 
his usual status update but begins by saying that DEC finally can offer 
a Unix license.  He reached down and brought up an automobile license 
place that said Unix (and Live Free or Die, since that's where the group 
lived.)  They had one for each person in the room.  The next year DEC 
Marketing wanted to repeat the game and the Unix group refused; so 
Marketing repeated but with a different license color.
-- 
  Dave Crocker
  Brandenburg InternetWorking
  bbiw.net