Introducing myself - CDC Cyber 170

After I graduated from high school in 1981, I attended U-Mass at Amherst system, a CDC Cyber 170. My first semester there I tried to avoid the computers totally, as I knew if I got involved, I?d get hooked. A friend in the dorm had rented a terminal for his room, and near the end of the semester I gave in and took a look at what it was all about. My second semester there (Spring, 1982) I took a Pascal course, and rented a terminal for my room. I rented some kind of clunker, but it was a CRT, and it had a 300-baud acoustic coupler, and it cost $180 to rent for the semester. But it was better than waiting in lines in the terminal room. The guy who rented a terminal the semester before showed me about ?Talk?, a program written by Ron (I can?t for the life of me remember his last name, but his ?nickname? was Salamir). Talk would allow a bunch of people to chat at once, and with a system that would allow 250 people logged in at once, there was usually 10-20 people on Talk at one time. This was a huge step-up from the ?two people talking to each other? programs I?d previously used on RST/E systems. Unfortunately, Talk was a HUGE computer resource hog, and the computer center powers killed it a few weeks into the semester. So I had to find other things to do. I learned some about the system ? that it was running NOS 1.4. You could buy all the NOS programming documentation at the bookstore, but I had absolutely no idea what it all meant. After coming from a DEC environment where documentation was ?pretty?, and fairly easy to read and understand, the CDC books with tiny print, and odd terms, were impossible to understand. I met Alan Green, who became a good computer friend, and taught me a lot about the Cyber system. I think Alan lived computers. I don?t know where or how he learned what he did, but he seemed to know everything about the Cyber before anyone else. He taught me how to understand the manuals, and all the ins and outs of NOS 1.4. Our accounts didn?t have any privileges, so we couldn?t do much. I spent most of my time working on my Pascal projects for class, and learning some system programming tricks from Alan. Everybody had to pick a ?nickname? for using Talk or MAIL. Everyone had a different way of picking names; some were based on favorite characters, others were based on their name, or something they liked. I didn?t know what the heck to use, so I said I would just pick a random word. I picked ?Skidaddle?. Who knows why. It soon got shortened to Skid, which is what I used for everything at U-Mass, and even afterwards on systems like AOL and Genie. People even started calling me Skid instead of Bob in the hallways, etc. It did not catch on though (after college) and no one calls me Skid these days. When I came back in the fall of 1982, there was a big change. I went to the terminal room right away, and the sign on the door said it was moved. So I went to the new place, and they had all new, ?sleek? looking terminals. I don?t remember exactly what they were, but I think it was something like ADM-3A?s. Alan was there, and he said they had upgraded the Cyber to NOS 2.0. That was a big change from NOS 1.4, he said. With a lot of new features. He had some ideas about writing a new ?talk? like program that would be much less resource intensive than Talk was, and that maybe the computer center would allow to run. He wrote a very simple prototype, which I helped him test and enhance. Alan, in his way of naming things, called it ?Wasteme? because it wasted people?s time. Wasteme grew from a very small prototype, to a larger program with some pretty neat features, and it got renamed to Twinkle. Alan appointed me Twinkle manager, whatever that meant. Basically I could use a few commands that others didn?t have, like evict and blacklist commands. The computer center never really tried to shut Twinkle off for quite a while. I think Alan had the pull with the right people to keep it going. U-Mass Amherst shared it?s Cyber with a few other schools; U-Mass Boston (which had their own machines, but also had access to the Amherst Cyber), and Hampshire College, and Mount Holyoke College. Twinkle was neat because people from the other schools could be on also. I wrote a lot of crazy programs during the fall 1982 semester. John Curran, who?s nickname was ?Avenger? wasn?t really much of a programmer, but had a lot of good ideas. So he gave me the ideas, and I implemented them. Alan Green was really the programmer ? he could sit down, and type Pascal code into the system without any line breaks for indenting, jamming as much on one line as possible, and he was a FAST typist. He would have an idea for a program, type away like this for half an hour, compile and run it with no errors. Of course, no one else could understand his programs. One of the main programs I wrote that a lot of people used I called ?GOODDAY?. You?d add it to your startup procedure, and when you logged in, it would ?greet? you. You could configure it with a multitude of options. It could print the dining commons menu for the day (or tomorrow, if it was after supper already), tell you who was on Talk, Wasteme, Twinkle, or whatever other talk system happened to be in common use at the time, and count your mail messages in a variety of mail systems that were in use. I?m sure it did other things also, but I don?t remember them now. In the Spring of 1983, Alan got much more interested in how the Cyber actually worked. There was a lot of stuff we didn?t know about NOS. A lot of mysteries about what the operators did, or could do. None of the students were operators, or had access to the ?back room? where the Cyber was housed, so the whole system operations side of it was a mystery. Alan started to experiment with things like what ?subsystems? were, and what other ones existed, what some of the system accounts were and what files were used to control system operation. Alan found (don?t ask me how) a way to go to up to a logged-in terminal and find out the user?s password in about 30 seconds. So, if someone left the room to go get a printout, but left their terminal logged in, it was easy to ?steal? their password, and of course their account was easy to find out. Alan kept this little loophole very quiet, but a few of us knew about it. We also knew that if the management wanted to talk to you, they?d change your password to something like ?SEEJUDY?. When you couldn?t log on, you?d go to the operator window, and they?d look up your password. Of course, they knew the secret ?code? ? if your password was ?see? or ?c? somebody, it meant they were to tell you to ?see? that person. One day, I was working on a project for a class and all of a sudden my files were gone. I thought this odd, as no one else had a problem. I used our little trick to see if my password was changed, and sure enough it was changed to ?CCHUCK?. Chuck was the head guy in charge. I used the command to send a message to the operator, saying my files were deleted. Some of the operators would send messages back to us at times, so we knew how to send messages to them. Anyway, there was no response. I sent this a few more times, and finally sent a message that said ?my password has been changed to cchuck? what?s going on??. Within a very short time, two computer center people were at my sides, asking me to come into the hallway. They wanted to know how I knew what my new password was. I told them how it was done in exchange for them giving my files back and not bothering me anymore. I still don?t know what triggered them to delete my files and change my password. During the Spring 1982 semester another interesting thing happened. Word was going around that you could go to Radio Shack, and ask them to give you a demo of CompuServe. You could watch what ID and password the salesperson used to log on, then go home, and log on yourself. Each store had their own demo ID. You could use these to log on and use CompuServe?s CB simulator. Well, the simulator was limited to users of other Radio Shack demo accounts, but I think just about everyone on were ?hijackers? like us. Anyway, one day our Cyber was down, so I got on the CompuServe CB simulator for lack of anything better to do (wow, was that primitive compared to Twinkle!) and started talking with a girl from Sacramento, CA who used a Cyber just like ours. Before half an hour, we had exchanged computer phone numbers and login information (before we even exchanged voice numbers) and later took turns calling each other?s Cyber to check out what it was like. We eventually became good friends (thanks to phone phreaking, it made long distance calling possible), and have visited each other several times. A friend of hers started logging onto our system, met someone from our system, came out to visit, and got married. One of the cool things the CSU Sacramento Cyber had was a ?oneliners bulletin board? where each user could post one line, per day. At the end of the day the board would be cleared. Their version was neat, but crude. I liked the idea, so sat down and wrote one myself in a few hours. My OnelIner program was one of the few programs we had that used single character input (i.e. you didn?t have to hit return after a command). At the end of the Spring 1982 semester, I spent a fair amount of time locating many source codes for all kinds of things ? programs I had written, programs my friends had written, and a lot of things I probably wasn?t supposed to have access to. I made a list, and prepared to make a batch job to back it all up onto tape. My last night there, I submitted the job, and one of the last things I did before leaving campus that semester was go to the operator window to retrieve my backup tape. They had it there, with a big note on it ?DO NOT RETURN?. It took a little coaxing, but I finally got them to give it to me. I?ve still got this tape, although I don?t know if it is readable, or how I could get the data off, or make use of it. I haven?t seen any Cyber 170 simulators, and don?t expect to find one anytime soon. After leaving U-Mass, I still kept in contact with the people and system for a few years via dial-up, and ?loaned? accounts. Alan had actually figured out how to create accounts on the system, and we had several self-created accounts such as TWINKLE, AVENGER, and SKID (that was me) for several years. Numeric-only accounts stood out even less, as student accounts were based on their 7-digit student ID number; I had two accounts I created, 4444555 and 7171717 which existed for even longer than the named ones. The computer center finally sanctioned a talk system called CONFER. It was actually a subsystem of NOS, so it was much more efficient. I don?t know if someone at U-Mass wrote it, or if it was purchased. No one knew anything about it, or if they did, they wouldn?t talk. It was quite different than Twinkle. The Talk system I wrote for VMS several years later embodied the best parts of Twinkle and Confer. There were quite a few people I came in contact with at U-Mass Amherst, especially through the use of the Twinkle system. I?ve lost contact with all of them. If anyone is reading this and remembers me, or the system, please drop me an E-mail. - Bob Lafleur Springfield, MA USA