20 Dec
2006
20 Dec
'06
4:19 a.m.
In article <B9639BAE3F34504E83FEEDD71D4AFB461CC2 at mail.bensene.com>,
"Rick Bensene" <rickb at bensene.com> writes:
I sure loved these systems. They were wonderful
systems to learning the
basics of computing through. They weren't as fully featured or flexible
as competitor Digital Equipment's RSTS/E timeshare systems (I have other
fun stories to tell about finding bugs in RSTS/E), but they HP system
were really a lot of fun, especially 2000/Access, which added a lot of
neat functions. I'm really happy that Jay has managed to find the
various special bits (microcode and mux hardware) that makes it possible
to have an operational HP Timeshared BASIC system running as "the real
thing".
Sounds like we share a common heritage here! I started on the HP for
a few months and then migrated to a PDP-11/70 RSTS/E machine, both at
the UDel.edu campus. The only "bug" I personally found in RSTS/E was
simply the observation that when you submitted a batch job, it ran as
user BATCH which was account [1,2]. Oops. Submitting a batch job
lets you run as a priveleged user? Cool! Let's run ACCT and list out
all the passwords! Hey, it works! Neat! I discovered this on a
weekend and informed the sysadmins on the following Monday. My fellow
non priveleged users wanted me to keep this backdoor a secret, but I
viewed it more as a defect than as an opportunity for future mischief.
As a result I was given a priveleged account. Its probably a bad idea
to give a 14 year old godlike powers over a timesharing system ;-). I
did cause a little mischief *after* they gave me a priveleged account,
but nothing too egregious. There was a program on RSTS/E called
'WATCH' that essentially snooped the input/output buffers on a TTY
line so that you could watch their output and their input on their
session. This was modified locally into a program caleld 'FORCE' that
let you force your own keyboard input into someone else's input
buffer. I caused some trouble by running FORCE and inserting what
appeared to be 'modem line noise' into other people's command stream,
just because I could. I didn't do it habitually, but I did abuse my
authority ... I vaguely remember being castigated for it, but I can't
recall how I was caught. I could have just been ratted out by someone
else in the lab :).
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