21 Dec
2006
21 Dec
'06
6:11 p.m.
OMG, that's about exactly the same arrangement we
had at my
high school- a buncha ASR-33's timesharing on the Globe Union
machine (before we bought their PDP-8).
We discovered that you could deposit about 3 words from the
console, one of which might have been the WHO IOT, and lo!
the user's ID and password (!) would be dumped into memory in
RAD50 (I think??) where you could easily read them back and
decode to ASCII at your leisure.
When I got to UWM, I discovered that the trick had been
foiled by Dick Bartlein (or was it Sam Milosevich??)
rewriting parts of TSS/8 to make it much more secure.
Wow, Tom, are you a Nicolet HS alumnus? From looking in my yearbooks I'm
guessing class of '78? I was class of '76 and spent both semesters of my
senior year in computer independent study so I spent a lot of time on that
8/e (ex-Globe Union that was purchased by Nicolet in the summer of '75).
Almost finished a PAL-D decomplier before I graduated. I then also went to
UWM and got to work on their Edusystem 50 too. I remember renting a table
top ASR33 and dialing into the UWM system from home.
One of these days I need to post an introduction of myself to this list. I
have conversed with several DECies on here so some have seen pictures of my
project. I am working on assembling all of the pieces to duplicate the
Nicolet HS Edusystem 50 and hope to get TSS/8 running on it someday. I want
to do a website documenting my project but for now everyone can see it here:
http://www.frappr.com/?a=myfrappr&id=844769
Everything in this system has been accumulated separately. It appears my
biggest stumbling block to getting TSS/8 running is finding a working
RF08/RS08. That's why I have the two RK05Js. I'm hoping I can somehow
re-write TSS/8 to run off of an RK05. I've got a lot of studying and
relearning to do before that happens. I'm still working on the
cleaning/cosmetic restoration right now. The bay above the 8/e is waiting
for the PC04 on my workbench. Then it will be time to reform caps, configure
boards, start powering things up and get OS/8 running as a start.
Tom, if you have any original pictures of the Nicolet system I would love to
see them. I have written the HS and they have been no help in finding any
pictures of it. I visited there last year for their 50th anniversary and saw
the 'closet' (rather small room) it used to live in down in the F wing
library. I remember its configuration was a little different than DEC would
have normally done. The TU56s/TC08 were in the left rack with the RF08/RS08
in the center.
I was pleasantly surprised to find a copy of the UWM TSS/8 Users Guide on
bitsavers recently.
Jon Miles