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

[John Day]

As long as we are on this sort of topic:

In the Burroughs 5500 and 6500, which of course were stack machines, 
the  MCP (the OS) was written in an extension of Algol, called Espol. 
The schedule of jobs to run was an array called the "sheet."  So of 
course there were variables related to it called, stackofsheet and 
pileofsheet.

User jobs were forked off the main OS stack as a cactus stack.  When 
a job ended it was no different than any other procedure exit only it 
returned to the OS.  The procedure to create a new process was called 
motherforker.

There was also something called godzillasphonenumber.  Not sure I 
ever did figure out what it was for. ;-)

When they re-did the file system, it had a wide range of file 
attributes that were accessible from a program by just writing 
filename.<attribute> as if it were a variable of the proper type. 
For example, to change the name of a file from a program one merely 
wrote Replace file.title by "some string"   Title was a pointer 
attribute.  Open was a boolean.  Setting it to True opened the file. 
etc.

The attributes were in an array and the attribute names were macros 
for the array index. (We knew this because we had access to the 
pre-release version 0.2 of the MCP for the B6700.  Illiac IV was a 
peripheral processor to B6700).   There were a *lot* of file 
attributes, some only available to the MCP.  The Cleary attribute 
(the name of one the guys on the OS team) was a pointer attribute 
that returned "I am not a pleasure unit." ;-)  (A line from a James 
Coburn In Like Flint movie, a spoof on James Bond.)  I will let you 
guess what its index was.  ;-)

Take care,
John

At 7:43 AM -0700 4/15/13, Michael.Urban at jpl.nasa.gov wrote:
>Dave Crocker writes:
>>
>>  Also, I'm told one of the project members became quite upset as the
>>  pattern of naming and declared that the names should be simpler and that
>>  the team should just call a spade a spade.
>>
>>  Hence forth, this was now called the Spade Project.
>>
>
>And if memory serves, the privileged account on SEX was 'SPDE' or some
>similar four-letter abbreviation of 'spade'; and I believe that the
>dubiously tasteful term 'super-spade' was applied to that login?   Just
>to provide some thematic unity with the root topic.  Hm.  Somewhere
>in the back of my mind some neuron is nagging me that 'spade' and
>'super-spade' were two, differently privileged, logins, but I
>can no longer recall the details.
>
>I don't know if Sigma-7 hardware was flakey as Dave said, or whether
>it was just UCLA's machine, which had some absurdly low serial number
>like '9', bristling with field-applied hardware patches.
>
>	MIKE at UCLA-NMC
>
>
>
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