That Unix has thrived and still exists to this day in the form of the BSDs and macOS is impressive. That someone from the mid 1970s could sit down at a modern computer and likely not feel as if they're in a completely alien world is just mindblowing. Will Unix-like OSes still be common in 2076? I wonder.
Interestingly, mullender.c still compiles and runs on NetBSD on my VAX in 2026 :)
Thalia's session was super awesome! Maybe the highlight of the conference.
A couple things to add:
There was much fumbling around with cables trying to hook up the Heathkit terminal to the PiDP-11. We then realized we were short a null modem cable and a female DB-25. I thought it was hopeless after this, but Thalia rigged it up with jumper wires and it totally worked :)
When I set my uid to 256, I knew the shell would print out a root prompt (from reading the code). I was not expecting the kernel to allow me to modify /etc/passwd. So that same weird behavior (masking the uid to 1 byte) is present in multiple places in the system. I checked a few other versions of Unix, and iirc the bug was present in v5 and v6, but not the first BSD.
It tickles me that people immediately do some hacking, like setting UID to 256 in /etc/passwd to obtain root, on these old systems. I've used a number of OSes like CDC's NOS and NOS/VE that in the 1980s were allowed to run "multi-level secure", classified and unclassified jobs at the same time. Here in the 21st century, I wonder how much of the security of NOS, for example, was due to people not getting to fool around with it, or just plain having a limited user population.
johnklos | 10 hours ago
That Unix has thrived and still exists to this day in the form of the BSDs and macOS is impressive. That someone from the mid 1970s could sit down at a modern computer and likely not feel as if they're in a completely alien world is just mindblowing. Will Unix-like OSes still be common in 2076? I wonder.
Interestingly, mullender.c still compiles and runs on NetBSD on my VAX in 2026 :)
glhaynes | 6 hours ago
This was lovely!
kenballus | 4 hours ago
Thalia's session was super awesome! Maybe the highlight of the conference.
A couple things to add:
bediger4000 | 59 minutes ago
It tickles me that people immediately do some hacking, like setting UID to 256 in /etc/passwd to obtain root, on these old systems. I've used a number of OSes like CDC's NOS and NOS/VE that in the 1980s were allowed to run "multi-level secure", classified and unclassified jobs at the same time. Here in the 21st century, I wonder how much of the security of NOS, for example, was due to people not getting to fool around with it, or just plain having a limited user population.