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

[John Day]

You left out Ari Ollikainen.  ;-)

Remember it well. (Well reasonably well)  ;-) The XDS-940 was a nice 
machine.  Although, I had not heard the story of its loss.  I am not 
all surprised, knowing the sense of humor around that group.

BTW, does anyone have one of those early one page teletype printed 
ARPANET maps that NMC created?  They showed which hosts were up and 
down.  The application that generated the map was on a well known 
socket and was far too popular.  It was terminated once the map 
wouldn't fit on one page.  It probably disappeared by 73 or so.

One of those should be ensconced in one of the collections some place.

At 6:15 PM -0700 4/13/13, Dave Crocker wrote:
>On 4/13/2013 5:15 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
>>which does bring this to mind:
>>http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1993-11-09/
>
>
>which, in turn, forces me to relate the following bit of Arpanet history...
>
>At UCLA, the local computer science dept. operating system was 
>home-grown and ran on an XDS Sigma-7.  In capabilities it was 
>roughly competitive with BBN's Tenex.  Developed by Vint Cerf, Jon 
>Postel, my brother Steve and some others.  They called it the Sigma 
>Executive. When I started working at the department, one of my jobs 
>was to assemble and develop documentation for users.
>
>You won't be surprised that the short name for the o/s was the SEX 
>system.  Nor that the user guide was called the SEX Manual.
>
>But unlike BBN, the UCLA system was a one-off.  No one else ran it, 
>and it was memory-starved.  Eventually, the guys located some 
>additional, used memory for a good price and lobbied Arpa for the 
>funds to buy it. Arpa saw that the o/s was a dead end and said we 
>should instead switch over to a terminal access system for using 
>computation over the Arpanet.
>
>The system we finally got was a PDP-11 running Unix.
>
>So they took our SEX away and made us Unix.
>
>The original root password was, inevitably, eunuchs.
>
>d/
>
>
>--
>  Dave Crocker
>  Brandenburg InternetWorking
>  bbiw.net