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"The hackers who wrote the Incompatible Timesharing System decided that file protection was usually used by a self-styled system manager to get power over everyone else," Stallman would later explain. "They didn't want anyone to be able to get power over them that way, so they didn't implement that kind of a feature. The result was, that whenever something in the system was broken, you could always fix it."
Through such vigilance, hackers managed to keep the AI Lab's machines security-free. Over at the nearby MIT Laboratory for Computer Sciences, however, security-minded faculty members won the day. The LCS installed its first password-based system in 1977. Once again, Stallman took it upon himself to correct what he saw as ethical laxity. Gaining access to the software code that controlled the password system, Stallman implanted a software command that sent out a message to any LCS user who attempted to choose a unique password. If a user entered "starfish," for example, the message came back something like:
I see you chose the password "starfish." I suggest that you switch to the password "carriage return." It's much easier to type, and also it stands up to the principle that there should be no passwords.
The fear that someone would take control and abuse power in that way was not an unfounded one.
I know in our computer lab in high school, which was a series of x86 PCs donated by Novell and sharing files from a Netware file server (this was 1989-1990), we used to try to get superuser privileges on the Netware server. Once or twice, the 20 year old kid they hired as a sysadmin would walk away from his desk and forget to logout of his workstation, and we would give ourselves superuser privileges on the network. We would use this privilege to play "Snipes," one of the first network based multiplayer text shooter games. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snipes
This fun lasted for a few hours until the 20 year old sysadmin determined we had superuser privs that we shouldn't have and promptly revoked our rights.
But the admins had installed "NetWork Eye" - sort of like a VNC for text monitors. So one guy in the class wrote an assembler (in TP) then got a NetBios book and wrote some low-level NetBios stuff in assembler. That allowed us to NetWork-Eye the servers to get some other funky stuff done.
One thing we did was to login on all 50 workstations (except one), and run the network eye in a cascaded chain. Then sit back and watch the first person come in. They're log in (on all 50 monitors simultaneously) and everything they did would come up on all 50. Usually took a few minutes before they noticed...
Ahh - good times.... <g>
Those system did not have network access at first and when they finally did most of the people on the net at the time were know (small community) and peer pressure kept people in line. ITS had a easy command that would kill and shutdown the machine. This took all the fun out of hacking the machine and killing it. There was always a loser that would try it and he would forever be forsaken by the Hackers.
Read Hackers by Steven Levy. I read that book every year almost.
So everything was great until the dumbass showed up and ruined everything? This makes a great argument for account privileges and security.
Because it's human nature to push that big, red button...
This obviously wouldn't work today but back then the culture of the users was very different.
Many people's passwords were known. I trusted nobody to rm everything, and nobody ever did.
The internet changed that.
I'm the mid-90s I worked at a UK university computer science department. At the time there were no firewalls around the departmental network and pretty much every machine, from the Sun and SGI workstations through to the multi-CPU servers, were directly connected to the Internet. We used NFS, rlogin and co. to transfer files and connect to different machines. I can remember logging into machines remotely from home using a modem, an ISP and passwords-in-the-clear. There was no regime I was aware of to apply software patches to machines.
Looking back, I can't believe how much of a trusting place the internet was back then.
I'd like to work on a totally open system where users could clone one another's blocks of memory and see everything. You could come up with a more collaborative environment than we have in unix atm. However, I wouldn't want an arrangement where one person's slip of the fingers could destroy the environment.
Don't forget these machines were in a much safer environment than todays.