21 Dec
2006
21 Dec
'06
4:18 p.m.
At 06:59 PM 12/20/2006 +0000, you wrote:
"Rick Bensene" <rickb at bensene.com>
wrote:
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.
Al would know more, probably.
[Computing] Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail
clippings mixed in. --Larry Wall in
<1994Jul21.173737.16853 at netlabs.com>
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WAN/LAN/Telcom Analyst, Tech Writer, MCP, CCNA, Registered Linux User 385531
We had quite a bit of fun writing little programs
which would wait
for a
specific time (during other people's classes),
and then "crash" the
system at that time. Eventually, we got caught.
This reminds me of an interesting phenomenon we discovered in 1974...
the high school had an ASR-33 connected via a leased data line
(telephone with acoustic coupler) to a PDP-8/E running TSS/8 at Clemson
University, 60 miles away.
I can't remember exactly what the code was any more, but it was a very
simple patch -we would deposit a mere three words at location 307
(octal) and execute it (ST 307), and the terminal would log on another
job. So you'd have two accounts open simultaneously on the same TTY!
And if you logged off one account the other would still be open so you
couldn't log off both... they'd have to reboot the system to kill it.
Any TSS/8 gurus know how we might have done this?