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

[Marty Lyons]

On Apr 11, 2013, at 7:02 PM, Dave Crocker <dhc2 at dcrocker.net> wrote:

>   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.

Woolongong had the first commercial stack for VMS if I recall.  But soon thereafter (I think 1991), TGV had their own version known as Multinet, which included more features (I wish I could remember the capabilities, as it was pretty neat stuff).  The most interesting part of that story was TGV was the acronym for the "official" company name, which should win some prize for creativity.   Three Guys and a Vax.  They were based in Santa Cruz.  Somewhere I have one of their t-shirts from the 1990 Interop.

DEC at the time (80/90s) really wanted everyone to run DECNET.  There was a lot of politics both internally and selling to customers to steer them away from both TCP and Unix.  Ultimately DEC shipped Ultrix, which was better than nothing.  But anyone who had capable hardware was running BSD.  One novel thing about Ultrix was you could have it act as a gateway between TCP and DECNET which allowed some interesting things.