Article 4634 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.ba.best.com!news1.best.com!newsfeed.mathworks.com!arclight.uoregon.edu!logbridge.uoregon.edu!newsfeed.berkeley.edu!ucberkeley!agate.berkeley.edu!agate!abbenay.CS.Berkeley.EDU!not-for-mail From: bh@abbenay.cs.berkeley.edu (Brian Harvey) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: ITS security [Re: Bulletproofing Tops10] Date: 22 Apr 2001 16:50:19 -0700 Organization: University of California, Berkeley, Computer Science Division Lines: 48 Message-ID: <9bvqnr$clp$1@abbenay.CS.Berkeley.EDU> References: <0VvE6.21685$vk1.29136@NewsReader> <9bv851$cff$1@abbenay.CS.Berkeley.EDU> NNTP-Posting-Host: abbenay.cs.berkeley.edu X-Trace: agate.berkeley.edu 987983417 7971 128.32.45.203 (22 Apr 2001 23:50:17 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@berkeley.edu NNTP-Posting-Date: 22 Apr 2001 23:50:17 GMT Xref: nntp1.ba.best.com alt.sys.pdp10:4634 "JD" writes: >Wasn't WAITS (the Stanford Tops10) a bit more into security? Didn't >you have to get Les Earnest or someone like that to authorise an >account before you could use that system? They had the brainwave to >change PPNs into 3 letter pairs (SIXBIT, right?) so you could be >[FOO,BH] instead of [123532,324234]. >(other posters, I am sure that 123532 is not SIXBIT /FOO/ ... please >don't flame). For most of the time that I was at SAIL, there was a [NET,GUE] login for Network Guests, with no password. I think files written in its directory were deleted on logout, but otherwise it could do anything a local user could do, until we started having malicious-user troubles. Then Ralph Gorin changed the file permission categories from the standard user-project-other to user-known-guest, i.e., a category for everyone other than GUE and a separate category for GUE. (Okay, I lied, it was never user-project-other. We used the "project" half of the PPN as a sort of cheap SFD feature before DEC invented SFDs, so the three categories were same PPN, same programmer, other.) The standard file protection allowed guests read access and everyone else read-write access. I got a free ice cream sundae out of this because after changing the file protection categories Ralph said something along the lines of "Now we're safe from malicious guests" and I bet him I could find a dozen ways that guests could still break into other accounts. The reason I won the bet is that WAITS was *not* very security-conscious; there was, for example, a UUO that put your program in "IOT-User" mode, in which it was allowed to do hardware I/O instructions. The purpose was to allow the robotics people to hack together hardware they could run directly, without having to write monitor support, but you could use it to read passwords off the disk. (That's right, they weren't encrypted.) We could, of course, disallow that one for guests, but we couldn't disallow the one that let you have the monitor as your upper segment, because the WHO program (sorta like systat) used it to gather its information. As for account authorization, all you had to do to create an account was log in under that PPN from a machine in the building. (Which was unlocked most of the time, by the way. But it was off of the main campus, so you had to make a special trip to be a malicious user in that way. :-) It's true that if we had no idea who you were, the account would eventually get turned off. But we were quite loose about letting random people wander in and start writing programs, many of which turned out to be useful. And you could set up your account with a remote-only password, so that if you were in the building you didn't need your password to log in. We did require a password for remote login, though, except for GUE. And I think I'm vaguely remembering that eventually GUE was turned off altogether. Article 4646 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.ba.best.com!news1.best.com!newsfeed.mathworks.com!dispose.news.demon.net!demon!btnet-peer0!btnet-feed5!btnet!NewsPeer!Fusion!NewsReader.POSTED!not-for-mail Reply-To: "JD" From: "JD" Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 References: <0VvE6.21685$vk1.29136@NewsReader> <9bv851$cff$1@abbenay.CS.Berkeley.EDU> <9bvqnr$clp$1@abbenay.CS.Berkeley.EDU> Subject: Re: ITS security [Re: Bulletproofing Tops10] Lines: 37 X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4133.2400 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4133.2400 Message-ID: Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2001 22:50:55 +0100 NNTP-Posting-Host: 213.123.161.231 X-Trace: NewsReader 988062878 213.123.161.231 (Mon, 23 Apr 2001 22:54:38 BST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2001 22:54:38 BST Xref: nntp1.ba.best.com alt.sys.pdp10:4646 "Brian Harvey" wrote in message news:9bvqnr$clp$1@abbenay.CS.Berkeley.EDU... (regarding SAIL, the Stanford version of Tops10 that ran at the Stanford AI Lab) > As for account authorization, all you had to do to create an account was log > in under that PPN from a machine in the building. (Which was unlocked most > of the time, by the way. But it was off of the main campus, so you had to > make a special trip to be a malicious user in that way. :-) It's true that > if we had no idea who you were, the account would eventually get turned off. > But we were quite loose about letting random people wander in and start > writing programs, many of which turned out to be useful. That was an amazing building: it looked like a flying saucer that had landed off Arastradero Road and never managed to take off again. As I recall they had named many of the rooms after places in the Tolkein stories: "The Prancing Pony", etc. The PDP10 was hooked up to a vending machine filled with tasty Chinese snacks (from The Little Restaurant in Menlo park, if I recall correctly), so you could charge food to your account, and also bet the machine "double or nothing". There was a lot at SAIL that was ahead of its time: multi-window screens, an interface to a TV camera and TV feeds, and one of the first Xerox laser printers which I recall being about the size of a small elephant. You could also type some combination of characters and "map" your screen and keyboard onto someone else's, enabling a kind of collaborative working. Change sevens to noughts for e-mail. Article 4657 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.ba.best.com!news1.best.com!feeder.via.net!newsfeed.berkeley.edu!ucberkeley!agate.berkeley.edu!agate!abbenay.CS.Berkeley.EDU!not-for-mail From: bh@abbenay.cs.berkeley.edu (Brian Harvey) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: WAITS (was: ITS security) Date: 23 Apr 2001 23:48:58 -0700 Organization: University of California, Berkeley, Computer Science Division Lines: 99 Message-ID: <9c37kq$dri$1@abbenay.CS.Berkeley.EDU> References: <9bvqnr$clp$1@abbenay.CS.Berkeley.EDU> NNTP-Posting-Host: abbenay.cs.berkeley.edu X-Trace: agate.berkeley.edu 988094935 28709 128.32.45.203 (24 Apr 2001 06:48:55 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@berkeley.edu NNTP-Posting-Date: 24 Apr 2001 06:48:55 GMT Xref: nntp1.ba.best.com alt.sys.pdp10:4657 cstacy says: >I would like to hear more things about WAITS in general. and "JD" writes: >That was an amazing building: it looked like a flying saucer that had >landed off Arastradero Road and never managed to take off again. As I >recall they had named many of the rooms after places in the Tolkein >stories: "The Prancing Pony", etc. The PDP10 was hooked up to a >vending machine filled with tasty Chinese snacks (from The Little >Restaurant in Menlo park, if I recall correctly), so you could charge >food to your account, and also bet the machine "double or nothing". And if you were over 21 it would sell you beer. (Most things in the machine could be bought with cash, but that one row couldn't; I think it was done by setting the price to something other than a multiple of 5 cents.) (Of course the over-21 thing didn't make the operation legal; we weren't licensed to sell anything, let alone beer.) Oh, and one out of 128 times you got your order free even without asking for double or nothing. And one row of the machine just had coins in it, for use in the non-computerized vending machines. I think that may have been the first ATM! >There was a lot at SAIL that was ahead of its time: multi-window >screens, an interface to a TV camera and TV feeds, and one of the >first Xerox laser printers which I recall being about the size of a >small elephant. You could also type some combination of characters >and "map" your screen and keyboard onto someone else's, enabling a >kind of collaborative working. The huge one wasn't a laser printer; it was an XGP (Xerox Graphics Printer), originally designed as one side of a really expensive fax. It was like a laser printer in that it was digitally driven photocopier, but instead of a laser it actually used a cathode ray tube that was scanned. It was a huge CRT, of which they only used a little strip in the middle, to avoid curvature and parallax problems. MIT-AI had one, too, and a couple of other places. The resolution was 200 dots/inch; the difference between that and the early laser printer 300 dots/inch was very dramatic; all the XGP serif fonts looked pretty jagged. I scanned in a sample of Baskerville font, my favorite, and spent a couple of months tweaking it. The result was readable, and fairly nice-looking, but I'm sure John Baskerville was rolling in his grave. (A few years ago I discovered that and some other XGP fonts on a diskette sold by some company that distributed free/shareware software for PCs.) The Data Disk video generator provided 32 channels of digital video; one was for the terminals not in use, and the other 31 were available for users. There were about twice that many terminal screens connected to the video switch, so only half could be used at a time. (Less, in practice, because eventually the disk that held the images developed bad spots, so some channels were unreadable. If you were really desperate you could ask for one of those normally-unused channels by typing ESC-!, or you could put yourself in a queue of people waiting for the good channels with ESC-CALL.) (ESC and CALL were two of the non-ASCII extra keys on the SAIL keyboards; the ASCII-ish code you thought I meant by ESC was labelled ALT on the keyboards, but generated 0175, not 033, which was not-equal in the SAIL character set. :-) The video switch could connect you to any of the Data Disk channels, or could OR several of them together, or could instead connect you to analog signals including the TV camera on the robot cart that drove around the parking lot as well as a couple of broadcast TV channels. (There was an audio switch, too, so you could get the TV picture and sound together. The monitors we used had high-persistence phosphor to reduce flicker, so watching TV was a little weird, like having ghosts.) A particularly nice feature was that you could ask to watch TV until your program finishes running, and then be switched back to your TTY display automatically. The keyboards that went with the monitors were entirely separate devices. You could be typing at one virtual terminal while watching a different one. So on the input end of things there was the mapping keyboard N ---------- virtual TTY M and on the output end there were two mappings screen N ----- Data Disk channel K ----- virtual TTY J and there were a slew of keyboard ESC commands to rearrange any of those mappings. In retrospect I'm amazed we could remember them all, but it seemed easy at the time! (Yes, you could ask to map your screen and/or your keyboard to someone else's TTY; that's another way in which I wouldn't exactly call WAITS security-minded. You could also ask to Hide your TTY (ESC H); this disabled other people from using the ordinary ESC 42 M to map their keyboard/screen to TTY42, if that was yours and hidden, or ESC [ BH ] to map to whatever TTY is in use by programmer name BH (the right half of the PPN), if hidden. But they could still type CONTROL-META-TOP-UNSHIFT-BREAK 42 M, or C-M-T-U-B [ BH ], to override the hiding. For a while this "magic" escape character was known only to system hackers, but at one point an insurrection among the users led to it becoming public.) No, I didn't still remember the magic character; I'm reading the Monitor Command Manual as I type this. :-) The monitor's display server let you partition the screen into "pieces of paper" and "pieces of glass," two styles of window, the first of which scrolled the text. This was one of the earliest window systems, and since several of our graduate students went to work at Xerox PARC and then at Apple, it was a direct ancestor of the Mac windows interface that later took over the world. Well I could go on forever but I guess I shouldn't... :-) Article 4655 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.ba.best.com!news1.best.com!newshub.sdsu.edu!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsfeed.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp!newsfeed.mesh.ad.jp!sjc-peer.news.verio.net!sea-feed.news.verio.net!news.verio.net!news.u.washington.edu!140.142.17.34.MISMATCH!news.u.washington.edu!Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU!mrc From: Mark Crispin Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: ITS security [Re: Bulletproofing Tops10] Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2001 19:54:19 -0700 Organization: Networks & Distributed Computing Lines: 33 Message-ID: References: <0VvE6.21685$vk1.29136@NewsReader> <9bv851$cff$1@abbenay.CS.Berkeley.EDU> <9bvqnr$clp$1@abbenay.CS.Berkeley.EDU> NNTP-Posting-Host: tomobiki-cho.cac.washington.edu Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Trace: nntp1.u.washington.edu 988080862 9070 (None) 140.142.17.35 X-Complaints-To: help@cac.washington.edu NNTP-Posting-User: hgm To: Brian Harvey In-Reply-To: <9bvqnr$clp$1@abbenay.CS.Berkeley.EDU> Xref: nntp1.ba.best.com alt.sys.pdp10:4655 On 22 Apr 2001, Brian Harvey wrote: > For most of the time that I was at SAIL, there was a [NET,GUE] login for > Network Guests, with no password. NET,GUE was turned off no later than the summer of '76. So, it was already off by the time you came back from IRCAM. > The reason I won the bet is that WAITS > was *not* very security-conscious; there was, for example, a UUO that put your > program in "IOT-User" mode, in which it was allowed to do hardware I/O > instructions. The camera was a great source of all ones, so it was easy with IOT user to instruct the camera to write into a single word...which happened to be the address of your privilege word. There were a few zillion other ways. Some, but not all, were closed. One of the ones you guys got was the ability to start an unlogged-in phantom, which could do a LOGIN UUO, which in turn took the job's new privileges as one of its arguments. One of the ones you guys never got was the easy way to get someone else's password. Open the victim's UFD as a file. 16 words of the JOBDAT held DDB pointers, indexed by I/O channel number. The directory's password was stored in the DDB, so it was a simple matter to do a PEEK UUO to get it. -- Mark -- http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate. Article 4635 of alt.sys.pdp10: Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Path: nntp1.ba.best.com!news1.best.com!newsfeed.mathworks.com!europa.netcrusader.net!63.208.208.143!feed2.onemain.com!feed1.onemain.com!uunet!dca.uu.net!ash.uu.net!world!news From: Christopher Stacy Subject: Re: ITS security [Re: Bulletproofing Tops10] Message-ID: Sender: CStacy@BONK Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 23:51:33 GMT References: <0VvE6.21685$vk1.29136@NewsReader> <9bv851$cff$1@abbenay.CS.Berkeley.EDU> NNTP-Posting-Host: ppp0b150.std.com Organization: The World @ Software Tool & Die X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.7/Emacs 20.7 Lines: 30 Xref: nntp1.ba.best.com alt.sys.pdp10:4635 >>>>> On Sun, 22 Apr 2001 22:59:39 +0100, JD ("JD") writes: JD> I also thought you could fairly freely mix colon commands and DDT commands. Unless you were in "monitor mode" (supposed to be a little more like a conventional user interface such as TOPS-10), then, yes. Many users would mix commands like :DELETE (a file) and ^F (list a directory). If you gave the command :MONMODE (or someone put that into your login init file for you), then DDT would prompt with a colon and expect colon commands like :LISTF. The :DDTMOD command put you back into normal mode. If you were in "monitor mode" and typed a rubout at the prompt, I think it would let you enter one control-character command. Logging in with the :LOGIN CSTACY command did not put you into monitor mode. Logging in with CSTACY$U was the same as :LOGIN, but put a zero value into the CLOBRF and MORWARN variables. Note that either way, the default for DELWARN was to be verbose, CONFRM is on, and so on. JD> Wasn't WAITS (the Stanford Tops10) a bit more into security? Well, WAITS of course started with TOPS-10 security. Maybe some SAIL people (MRC? BH?) will be able to comment on how it was modified, but it certainly had user accounts. I have heard that it was not too unusual for DEC customers to modify TOPS-10 policies about how PPNs worked. WAITS may have had some interesting things going on with that, though. I would like to hear more things about WAITS in general. ITS was an original system; it was not a version of TOPS-10 or anything else. I don't know of any other general purpose timesharing systems besides ITS that eschewed security. Article 4637 of alt.sys.pdp10: Message-ID: <3AE40C9D.54B74A2E@Empire.Net> Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2001 07:06:05 -0400 From: John Sauter Organization: System Eyes Computer Store X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.73 [en]C-CCK-MCD NSCPCD47 (WinNT; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: ITS security [Re: Bulletproofing Tops10] References: <0VvE6.21685$vk1.29136@NewsReader> <9bv851$cff$1@abbenay.CS.Berkeley.EDU> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit NNTP-Posting-Host: 198.144.141.143 X-Trace: News.Destek.net 988023956 198.144.141.143 (23 Apr 2001 07:05:56 -0500) Lines: 9 Path: nntp1.ba.best.com!news1.best.com!news2.best.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsfeed.cwix.com!News.Destek.net Xref: nntp1.ba.best.com alt.sys.pdp10:4637 JD wrote (excerpted): "They had the brainwave to change PPNs into 3 letter pairs (SIXBIT, right?) so you could be [FOO,BH] instead of [123532,324234]." One of the first changes I made to the PDP-6 monitor at SAIL was to change the PPN from octal to sixbit. I was [1,JBS]. I also made sure I was first on the backup tapes. John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.NET) Article 4639 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.ba.best.com!news1.best.com!news2.best.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!feed2.news.rcn.net!feed1.news.rcn.net!rcn!207-172-245-236 From: jmfbahciv@aol.com Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: ITS security [Re: Bulletproofing Tops10] Date: Mon, 23 Apr 01 08:54:15 GMT Organization: UltraNet Communications, Inc. Lines: 18 Message-ID: <9c137a$p4b$3@bob.news.rcn.net> References: <0VvE6.21685$vk1.29136@NewsReader> <9bv851$cff$1@abbenay.CS.Berkeley.EDU> <3AE40C9D.54B74A2E@Empire.Net> X-Trace: UmFuZG9tSVannwO4FEN0P5rVuz+V5o/ST+ETVqQqZTVo2YOvUJht1L799OdllvSm X-Complaints-To: abuse@rcn.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 23 Apr 2001 11:21:14 GMT X-Newsreader: News Xpress Version 1.0 Beta #4 Xref: nntp1.ba.best.com alt.sys.pdp10:4639 In article <3AE40C9D.54B74A2E@Empire.Net>, John Sauter wrote: >JD wrote (excerpted): >"They had the brainwave to change PPNs into 3 letter pairs (SIXBIT, >right?) so you could be [FOO,BH] instead of [123532,324234]." > >One of the first changes I made to the PDP-6 monitor >at SAIL was to change the PPN from octal to sixbit. >I was [1,JBS]. I also made sure I was first on the >backup tapes. Wasn't that [being first on the backup\pukcab\failsa tapes] risky, John? It was always the beginning of the tape that got chewed up. /BAH Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail. Article 4653 of alt.sys.pdp10: Message-ID: <3AE4DDE2.C31491AA@Empire.Net> Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2001 21:58:58 -0400 From: John Sauter Organization: System Eyes Computer Store X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.73 [en]C-CCK-MCD NSCPCD47 (WinNT; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: ITS security [Re: Bulletproofing Tops10] References: <0VvE6.21685$vk1.29136@NewsReader> <9bv851$cff$1@abbenay.CS.Berkeley.EDU> <3AE40C9D.54B74A2E@Empire.Net> <9c137a$p4b$3@bob.news.rcn.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit NNTP-Posting-Host: 198.144.140.189 X-Trace: News.Destek.net 988077527 198.144.140.189 (23 Apr 2001 21:58:47 -0500) Lines: 27 Path: nntp1.ba.best.com!news1.best.com!newsfeed.mathworks.com!newsfeed.cwix.com!andromeda.5sc.net!mozart.jlc.net!News.Destek.net Xref: nntp1.ba.best.com alt.sys.pdp10:4653 I figured if I was at the beginning of the tape, then if a random spot on the tape failed, my data was likeliest to be retrievable. I was always afraid that Failsa would be unable to make it past a bad spot. John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net) jmfbahciv@aol.com wrote: > > In article <3AE40C9D.54B74A2E@Empire.Net>, > John Sauter wrote: > >JD wrote (excerpted): > >"They had the brainwave to change PPNs into 3 letter pairs (SIXBIT, > >right?) so you could be [FOO,BH] instead of [123532,324234]." > > > >One of the first changes I made to the PDP-6 monitor > >at SAIL was to change the PPN from octal to sixbit. > >I was [1,JBS]. I also made sure I was first on the > >backup tapes. > > Wasn't that [being first on the backup\pukcab\failsa tapes] > risky, John? It was always the beginning of the tape > that got chewed up. > > /BAH > > Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail. Article 4659 of alt.sys.pdp10: Message-ID: <3AE56098.D1A7BD0F@Empire.Net> Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 07:16:40 -0400 From: John Sauter Organization: System Eyes Computer Store X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.73 [en]C-CCK-MCD NSCPCD47 (WinNT; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: ITS security [Re: Bulletproofing Tops10] References: <0VvE6.21685$vk1.29136@NewsReader> <9bv851$cff$1@abbenay.CS.Berkeley.EDU> <3AE40C9D.54B74A2E@Empire.Net> <9c137a$p4b$3@bob.news.rcn.net> <3AE4DDE2.C31491AA@Empire.Net> <9c3ktb$pkj$1@bob.news.rcn.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit NNTP-Posting-Host: 198.144.140.116 X-Trace: News.Destek.net 988110988 198.144.140.116 (24 Apr 2001 07:16:28 -0500) Lines: 7 Path: nntp1.ba.best.com!news1.best.com!newsfeed.mathworks.com!newsfeed.cwix.com!News.Destek.net Xref: nntp1.ba.best.com alt.sys.pdp10:4659 My memory of those tape drives has faded somewhat, but I do recall that they consumed tapes. At one point I wrote the monitor sources on paper tape so I would have a reliable backup. I think I was trying to impress management with the need for a good backup device. John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net) Article 4684 of alt.sys.pdp10: Message-ID: <3AEB5CE5.5F4D9C52@Empire.Net> Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 20:14:29 -0400 From: John Sauter Organization: System Eyes Computer Store X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.73 [en]C-CCK-MCD NSCPCD47 (WinNT; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: ITS security [Re: Bulletproofing Tops10] References: <3AE56098.D1A7BD0F@Empire.Net> <9c68mg$30i$1@bob.news.rcn.net> <3AE75EC0.D6D1C0C4@Empire.Net> <9cf1sv$iao$1@abbenay.CS.Berkeley.EDU> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit NNTP-Posting-Host: 198.144.140.97 X-Trace: News.Destek.net 988503268 198.144.140.97 (28 Apr 2001 20:14:28 -0500) Lines: 16 Path: nntp1.ba.best.com!news1.best.com!newsfeed.mathworks.com!news.mv.net!News.Destek.net Xref: nntp1.ba.best.com alt.sys.pdp10:4684 Thank you, Brian. I guess the tape drive worked after all. John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net) Brian Harvey wrote: > > John Sauter writes: > >However, as best I recall it didn't work. I left in > >late 1968, so I don't know if SAIL ever had a reliable > >backup device. Does anyone? > > I don't remember having trouble reading the DART (backup) tapes when > I was there mid-70s. And everything was backed up at least twice. > And not too long ago Martin Frost copied all those old tapes onto, I forget, > some currently-readable medium, so you can still retrieve all our old > love letters and flame wars if you're so inclined. Article 4652 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.ba.best.com!news1.best.com!newsfeed.mathworks.com!news.voicenet.com!feed2.news.rcn.net!rcn!chnws02.mediaone.net!chnws06.ne.mediaone.net!24.128.8.70!typhoon.ne.mediaone.net.POSTED!not-for-mail Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: ITS security [Re: Bulletproofing Tops10] References: <0VvE6.21685$vk1.29136@NewsReader> <9bv851$cff$1@abbenay.CS.Berkeley.EDU> <3AE40C9D.54B74A2E@Empire.Net> From: Ric Werme X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.0 CURRENT #119 Lines: 25 Message-ID: Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 01:51:47 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.91.12.32 X-Complaints-To: abuse@mediaone.net X-Trace: typhoon.ne.mediaone.net 988077107 24.91.12.32 (Mon, 23 Apr 2001 21:51:47 EDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2001 21:51:47 EDT Organization: Road Runner Xref: nntp1.ba.best.com alt.sys.pdp10:4652 John Sauter writes: >JD wrote (excerpted): >"They had the brainwave to change PPNs into 3 letter pairs (SIXBIT, >right?) so you could be [FOO,BH] instead of [123532,324234]." >One of the first changes I made to the PDP-6 monitor >at SAIL was to change the PPN from octal to sixbit. >I was [1,JBS]. At C-MU, computer accounts before the PDP-10 showed up were things like S600EW13 (S for science, 600 for course number "Computer Programming and Problem Solving I), EW for me, 13 because I was the 13th EW to come along. (Being born on Friday the 13th had nothing to do with it.) The last character could be alphabetic, so the "man number" could have 26 * 26 * 10 * 36 permutations, or 243,360. 2^18 = 262,144. So one of my first programming jobs was to teach TOPS-10 about C-MU account numbers.... -Ric Werme -- Ric Werme | werme@nospam.mediaone.net http://people.ne.mediaone.net/werme | ^^^^^^^ delete Article 4660 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.ba.best.com!news1.best.com!newsfeed.mathworks.com!news-out.cwix.com!newsfeed.cwix.com!chnws02.mediaone.net!chnws06.ne.mediaone.net!24.128.8.70!typhoon.ne.mediaone.net.POSTED!not-for-mail Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: ITS security [Re: Bulletproofing Tops10] References: <0VvE6.21685$vk1.29136@NewsReader> <9bv851$cff$1@abbenay.CS.Berkeley.EDU> <3AE40C9D.54B74A2E@Empire.Net> <3AE4DE73.5DAC1DA0@Empire.Net> From: Ric Werme X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.0 CURRENT #119 Lines: 39 Message-ID: <7GoF6.33960$%_1.9690518@typhoon.ne.mediaone.net> Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 00:14:59 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.91.12.32 X-Complaints-To: abuse@mediaone.net X-Trace: typhoon.ne.mediaone.net 988157699 24.91.12.32 (Tue, 24 Apr 2001 20:14:59 EDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 20:14:59 EDT Organization: Road Runner Xref: nntp1.ba.best.com alt.sys.pdp10:4660 John Sauter writes: >How did you end up mapping the account number into >36 bits? The A-Z places counts as 0-25, 0-9 count as 0-9, and 0-Z (A-9?) count as 0-35. The "project" part was easy: S600 = 18 * 1000 + 6 * 100 + 0 * 10 + 0 * 1, lots of room. The "programmer"/"Man number" for EW13 went like: EW13 = (4 * 26 * 10 * 36) + (22 * 10 * 36) + (1 * 36) + 3 or the CPU friendly EW13 = ( 4 * 26 + 22) * 10 + 1) * 36) + 3 and the highest one is ZZ9Z = (25 * 26 + 25) * 10 + 9) * 36) + 35 The A-Z places counts as 0-25, 0-9 count as 0-9, and 0-Z (A-9?) count as 0-35. >Ric Werme wrote: >> At C-MU, computer accounts before the PDP-10 showed up were things >> like S600EW13 (S for science, 600 for course number "Computer >> Programming and Problem Solving I), EW for me, 13 because I was the >> 13th EW to come along. (Being born on Friday the 13th had nothing to >> do with it.) The last character could be alphabetic, so the "man >> number" could have 26 * 26 * 10 * 36 permutations, or 243,360. 2^18 = >> 262,144. >> >> So one of my first programming jobs was to teach TOPS-10 about C-MU >> account numbers.... >> >> -Ric Werme >> -- >> Ric Werme | werme@nospam.mediaone.net >> http://people.ne.mediaone.net/werme | ^^^^^^^ delete -- Ric Werme | werme@nospam.mediaone.net http://people.ne.mediaone.net/werme | ^^^^^^^ delete