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Comment by nubinetwork | Hacker News Reader

Ah qnx... the heart of the Unisys/Burroughs Icon.

They had a pretty nasty bug back in the day... https://www.juliandunn.net/2006/08/21/on-hacking-the-unisys-...

It basically went like: "I am root" "Yes, you are root" :)

QNX on the ICON was full of bad security form in general, including default passwords for root, supervisor, teacher, and icon (blank) that were rarely changed in the classroom and could be found in the manual at the front of the room: https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/icon-computer/

The ICON was the first computer that I used that had a multi-user interface. Teachers were not trained well and "computer security" was not something that had yet seriously entered our language. While programming them for class was interesting, the real fun was trying to get "cool stuff" to work. We learned BASIC and Pascal in class, but we hacked C and wrote interesting shell scripts after our code worked. Kind of cool to see where it ended up (with BBY and all).

Are there any working examples still out there?

Indeed, when I was in eighth grade we had “reading buddies” in the grade 1 class where older kids would go read the younger children stories. The teacher of the grade 1 class had an internal memo posted on the bulletin board explaining teachers’ usernames were their last name and password was their first name. So after I saw that I could get teacher-level access by knowing any teacher’s first name.

From there it was possible to trackball-and-ACTION-key my way to administrator permissions which is maybe what the bug referred to in GP was referring to?

Anyways my big mistake was sharing this information with my classmates — it was fun to change the login message for everyone to a kind of “so long suckers” just before we graduated, but apparently someone changed the admin password and (presumably due to not being aware of the bug) locked them out.

The vice principal had me come back to school after graduating to be chewed out and told that they nearly charged me with mischief :-/

When I got to high school I mostly just had fun finding a way to drop into the command line and playing around with that instead of working around access controls…

As a co-op student, I worked on a CAD system that was meant to run on the ICON to teach CAD/CAM fundamentals. Not sure if it ever shipped.

I do remember this "unix" variant being particularly painful to work with. One might even say spectacularly painful.

I also remember having to work around the lack of environment variables (in the 80s I think), but reading through the Wikipedia entry it looks like that restriction is long gone.

Wow, that's a throwback. I remember when my Ontario high-school in '84 or '85 got a whole room full of ICON computers. It was a total miserable nightmare for the teaching staff as each computer class had at least a couple of students with the skills to elevate themselves to root privileges and cause constant mischief.

The ICONs were way more fun from the aging Commodore Pets that had populated Ontario high-schools, and the big trackballs felt futuristic.

Yes! By the time I was in high school in Ontario (early 90s) we had PCs as I recall, but in grade school there were Pets and then later ICONs. At home a lot of kids had C64s, though my family’s first machine was an IBM XT clone.

I vaguely remember a mysterious “other room” where ICON-related things happened - this must have been where the LEXICON server was located.

  > It basically went like: "I am root" "Yes, you are root" :)

How prescient! Advanced AI, way back then!

It was more like "Give me root's terminal", "Ok, here you go!"

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