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

[John Day]

At 8:06 PM -0400 4/11/13, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>     > 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).

It was at Illinois but it wasn't me.  Mainly Gary Grossman, Steve 
Bunch and John Mullen.  Our group I just didn't work on that code. 
They did that in the Summer of 1975.  Then Bunch stripped down V6 
Unix to run on an LSI-11 as an "intelligent terminal" with a plasma 
screen and touch. (think of an X-terminal before X).

I am sorry.  The first UNIX we put on the Net was NCP only.  That was 
in 75.  We probably had TCP up in the early 77 time frame.

John

>
>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