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

[John Day]

At 1:34 AM -0700 4/12/13, Jack Haverty wrote:
>On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 4:27 PM, Miles Fidelman
><mfidelman at meetinghouse.net> wrote:
>
>>  Do I recall correctly that at least one of the early "reference
>>  implementations" was written for Unix, with portions of it remaining in BSD
>>  Unix to this day?
>>
>
>Yes, and no.  I know because I wrote, debugged, and made functional
>the first implementation of TCP for Unix, as part of the projects
>which Vint had BBN doing at the time.

Let me check on that later today.  The Illinois TCP on Unix may have 
actually been earlier but only by  at most a year.  Does it matter 
that DCA was paying for it rather than DARPA?

John

>It was based on the TCP which
>Jim Mathis at SRI had recently written for the MOS environment, whose
>only relationship to Unix was that they both ran on PDP-11 processors.
>  I still have a listing of my TCP code, dated March 30, 1979 and
>recording the important fact that at the time the moon was at New Moon
>  plus 2 days, 11 hours, 27 minutes, and 40 seconds.   The TCP was
>written in Macro-11, and running on a sadly underpowered PDP-11/40.
>It was used in the first "TCP Bakeoff", battling with other
>implementations - Bob Braden's on the 360, Dave Clark's on Multics,
>Bill Plummer's PDP-10, etc.  I know there were other people involved
>at different sites, but I can only remember (some of the) ones who
>came to the meeting.  There must be some old IEN that documented that.
>
>However, none of that first Unix TCP code could possibly be in BSD
>today, unless BSD is somehow running PDP-11 assembly code.   Al Nemeth
>and Mike Wingfield were involved in subsequently writing TCP for the
>11/70 Unix environment, and Rob Gurwitz for the Vax.   Rob's code
>might have survived in some form in BSD, but you'd probably need some
>fancy digital DNA testing to determine that.  John Sax did TCP for the
>HP-3000 - but I can't recall if that was Unix or not.
>
>That Unix TCP was my first assignment as a new employee at BBN.  I had
>not heard of TCP.  I had seen someone at MIT using Unix, and watched
>for a few minutes, but I was unable to decipher the gibberish on the
>screen or understand the arcane commands being typed.   I had never
>used a PDP-11/40.   I had never heard of MOS.  And I didn't know a lot
>about networking below the layers of email and such.
>
>So of course I was perfectly qualified for the job!
>
>/Jack Haverty