Around 1982, I had an account on MIT-MC, an ITS computer. I was not an MIT student -- rather, a curious teenage hacker from DC. I'd found a text file with 'interesting modem numbers,' and one of those was to a DoD TAC (basically, a dial-in). I recall the text file had a note saying how to connect (via NCP, not TCP/IP) to MIT-MC.
I connected, and remember playing around (as we did) at the login prompt. I probably tried to login as 'guest' or something, and the result was basically, 'There's no user by that name. Do you want an account?' Of course, I said yes -- and shortly received my own account.
Stallman may have been sponsoring logins for folks like myself; he definitely was a little later when I got an account on MIT-AI (or was it MIT-OZ?), which was by that point a TOPS-20 machine.
ITS was a very bizarre system, really with its own social culture. Even in 1982, it felt strangely archaic. The debugger-as-shell was definitely an interesting concept.
Once I accidentally deleted a file. I felt awful, and emailed one of the admins, assuming they'd kick me off. He was like, 'Ah, no worries. We'll just restore it from tape.'
I dialed it enough times that I still remember it. Much thanks to Bruce of "Bruce's NorthStar" BBS in Virginia for that phone number. [1]
MIT-MC: @L 236
MIT-AI: @L 134
MIT-DM: @L 70
MIT-ML: @L 198
Anyone remember how to do a TIP-to-TIP link, as documented on page 5-4 of the "Users Guide to the Terminal IMP" [2], by connecting an input and output socket of one TIP to an input and output socket of another TIP, through an unsuspecting host, so you could chat back and forth directly between two TIP dial-ups, without actually logging into the host?
It went something like @HOST #, @SEND TO SOCKET #, @RECEIVE FROM SOCKET #, @PROTOCOL BOTH, making sure the sockets were different parity so as not to violate the Anita Bryant clause with homosocketuality. [3]
You could also add the octal device port number of any other TIP user on your same TIP after the @ and before the command, to execute those commands on their session. (See page 5-7, "Setting Another Terminal's Parameters".) BBN wrote such great documentation and would mail copies of it for free to anyone who asked (that's how I got mine), you couldn't even call it security by obscurity!
The "ARPANET" episode of "The Americans" really missed the boat about how easy it was to break into the ARPANET. I didn't even have to kill anyone! [3] [4] Makes me wonder about the part about squeezing your anus... [5]
I was HNIJ@MIT-MC (and later, rms.g.hnij@mit-oz). I used to be able to google for those addresses and pull up my now-embarrassing questions I posted on various mailing lists as a teenager.
Oh yes, I remember you and your eminently googlable uname!
I'm just glad that nobody can google the message I sent to the LISP@AI mailing list asking how to set the value of a variable. Soooooo embarrassing!
I'm sure KMP's eyes rolled up to the back of his head, but then he took the time to help me out with TEACH-LISP (which Jerry Pournelle was ignorant enough to cite in a not-friendly light when he condemned LISP in his Byte column Cretin Manor [1]).
"The man has learned nothing from his presence on MC and sets a bad example of what people might potentially accomplish there. I'd rather recycle his account for some bright 12-yr-old..." -KMP
"One thing that is known about ARPA: you can be heaved off it for supporting the policies of the Department of Defense. Of course that was intended to anger me. If you have an ARPA account, please tell CSTACY that he was successful; now let us see if my Pentagon friends can upset him. Or perhaps some reporter friends. Or both., Or even the House Armed Services Committee." -POURNE
Speaking of googling for unames, it's amusing how POURNE's right wing nut bag GamerGate supporters defended him by complaining about KLOTZ's name and presumed gender [2]:
"The first thing I noticed was that the nasty message to Dr. Pournelle came from a woman bureaucrat. Those broads are the worst type of mean, nasty and petty, hiding their vindictiveness behind a facade of professional-sounding language. Love Jerry's response! Seppuku, ha!"
In reply one of them attempted to dox and defame the people on USER-A and their infamous careers and naming conventions:
"Actually, if you mean "Leigh L Klotz" that's not a woman. I did a little research on the names there. A Leigh L. Klotz Jr. - male - graduated from MIT in 1989 and went on to work at Xerox PARC and is active on the W3C. Unless there was a Klotz Sr. professoring at MIT (I can't find a record of such), then Dr. Pournelle was being hectored by a snot-nosed undergrad.
David Vinayak Wallace I don't have an age or graduation date for, but he went on to co-found Cygnus Support (later merged into Red Hat) in 1989, the same year Klotz graduated. When Wallace got married, he hyphenated his name and now goes by David Henkel-Wallace.
Kent Pitman has made a career out of LISP, and responds to Pournelle's criticism of his pet language with typical gamma rage. Like Klotz, he's made committees a big part of his life.
Having worked with the W3C in the past, I have very little respect for anyone who maintains a long-standing releationship with that body. It is a perfect warren of passive-aggressive rabbits."
"Klotz"? Seriously?
"Take note of Aspinall as well.
For our hodge-podge of a language and culture, it kind of sucks that we don't have the kind of family names that readily describe family values or characteristics in the plain language like, say, Russian does. It makes for a better sense of irony and justice when telling the story. Treasure the times when the power of fate brings them together in English, like here for instance."
Klotz is a word in German. It means something block. A Klotz is usually a big block or also often a block which makes some kind problems: 'Die JVM ist wie ein Klotz am Bein.' -> 'The JVM is like block tied to your leg.' A Klotz can also be a slightly too big building. 'Das ist aber ein Klotz!' There is also the verb 'klotzen', which usually means doing something with a lot of effort or when the result is large. 'ranklotzen' then means working hard.
What's this I hear from the GamerGate folks about you being a woman bureaucrat, a broad who is the worst type of mean, nasty and petty, hiding your vindictiveness behind a facade of professional-sounding language (they do say Logo is just Lisp without parens), and also a snot nosed hectoring undergrad? You've been an inspiration to us all, and the computer industry need more nasty women like you!
I heard an alternative fact that Kent Pitman develop a New Implementation of Lisp in which NIL equals T, which inspired many other popular languages like PHP and JavaScript to adopt alternative definitions of equality, based on the insight that all objects are equal, but some objects are more equal than others.
And speaking of bright 12-year-olds, I heard that David Vinayak Wallace was the youngest kid to ever have his own office at the MIT-AI Lab, and as a small brown child he once schooled Jerry Pournelle for free [1]:
Date: Sunday, 2 January 1983, 22:48-EST
From: David Vinayak Wallace
Subject: The changing face of Micro-computing...
Date: 31 December 1982 04:00-EST
From: Jerry E. Pournelle
(I re-ordered some of your statements)
The notion that "It's too late for the parents" is
goofy. Bill and Sibyl Grieb have packed classes at everywoman's
Village on using computers; they teach CP/M and customization
and all that.
Patience: it took far longer for the "average citizen"
to learn enough mechanics to be able to be comfortable using
cars than it is taking for people to get used to computers.
I think this example shows why it IS too late. You can always find a
few exceptions to the rule; these exceptions are a tiny (>.5%) part
of the actual computer user. I doesn't take mechanical knowledge to
drive a car, it takes mechanical knowledge to modify or repair an
automobile. most people (me included) would rather buy a vanilla
car and just have it work all the time. I change the oil (more than
most people do), but have a mechanic do the real work.
The problem with adult learners are the ones I had: no one seems
to know how to explain things in English. You have to learn a
lot more than you really need to in order to be able to do much
of anything. Some of us, though, are trying to change that, and
a few of us are not only doing something about it, but getting
paid to.
The High Priest mentality in which one accepts whatever a highly
paid computer technician tells you, is dying away in industry
already, and the micro world ain't going to let it get a foot
hold...
I'm biased, but I don't think this will really work. You can't
discuss complex concepts without the proper language. I agree that
there is a bit of High Priest mentality and that there is no good
effort to teach the JARGON, but every "normal language" explanation
of anything having to do with computers comes out muddled,
long-winded, and ultimately, unclear..
Some of us even do it for free.
david
Didn't even know they eventually replaced AI with a KS10--I had left MIT by 1980-ish (was sysadmin for MIT-EECS and the EE dept LispMs) and didn't keep up much with the goings-on there.
I was looking for Ron Schnell's original Maclisp verison of the DUNNET game. He said it might be on backup tapes from MIT-EECS. But I suspect such backups do not exist any more.
I will buy many beers if anyone can find me the original version. It was much different! Maybe better. Instead of finding yourself in a Vax/UNIX, you were inside a Dec-20 running Twenex. It used the COMND library, which simulated the COMND JRST. I wrote the elisp version trying to remember the "sort" of stuff I did with the original version, but even I would be surprised by what was actually in there...
I connected, and remember playing around (as we did) at the login prompt. I probably tried to login as 'guest' or something, and the result was basically, 'There's no user by that name. Do you want an account?' Of course, I said yes -- and shortly received my own account.
Stallman may have been sponsoring logins for folks like myself; he definitely was a little later when I got an account on MIT-AI (or was it MIT-OZ?), which was by that point a TOPS-20 machine.
ITS was a very bizarre system, really with its own social culture. Even in 1982, it felt strangely archaic. The debugger-as-shell was definitely an interesting concept.
Once I accidentally deleted a file. I felt awful, and emailed one of the admins, assuming they'd kick me off. He was like, 'Ah, no worries. We'll just restore it from tape.'