[ih] Why is there (still) spam...?

[Nigel Roberts]

>> Computers were attended by armies of administrators and operators, 
>> who protected their expensive resources with the technology of the 
>> day, such as passwords and quotas. 
>
> That does not sound like what I remember hearing about, for the 
> operations and use of some of the MIT research computers...
>
Not exactly my recollection, either.

If we are talking about MIT computers I remember the following 
interchange, the first time I connected to ITS in early 1978. (It's been 
a long time so please forgive the many inaccuracies in remembered syntax)

@O70

:LOGIN NIGEL

YOU DO NOT APPEAR TO HAVE ACCOUNT. WOULD YOU LIKE ONE?

:Y

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE CALLED?

NIGEL

WELCOME, TOURIST.



Such casual use by this stranger from overseas who just happened to have 
worked out how to connect to the only ARPAnet node in the UK and thence 
to the systems, particularly MIT-AI (134) and MIT-DM (70) was actively 
encouraged.

Following which we found DUNGEON aka ZORK.

And it was this passwordless openness that inspired the creation of MUD, 
the ancestor of most all multiplayer games.

(I know the folks at DM were really doing some statistical stuff, and 
the DM stood for Dynamic Modelling or something close to that, but I 
always remember it as "dungeon masters".)

The ITS command :OS allowed you to watch what was going on any other 
terminal, and I even have a vague recollection that there was a command 
that allowed anyone to crash the system.

So, not exactly that guarded.