Econet was awesome --- by default the Econet ROM for BBC Micros ran a server which supported a variety of useful RPCs. These included: PEEK - allows one machin

Econet was awesome --- by default the Econet ROM for BBC Micros ran a server which supported a variety of useful RPCs. These included: PEEK - allows one machine to read an arbitrary chunk of memory from another. POKE - allows one machine to write an abitrary chunk of memory to another. JSR - allows one machine to send an executable chunk of memory to another station, which then executes it (max size 128 bytes). HALT/CONTINUE - allows one machine to freeze another (so that you can use the above calls to fiddle with its memory). These were system calls and required programming skills to use, but the ROM provided various human-usable commands like * VIEW (which copies a remote machine's screen to yours), or * REMOTE (which slaves a remote machine's keyboard to yours). You could tell your machine to stop listening to all this stuff with * PROT, but it was all on by default. (And * PROT wouldn't protect you from commands sent from particular privileged addresses.) [Note: system shell commands on Acorn operating systems traditionally started with a * , but HN is having trouble rendering it. Ignore the spaces between the * and the command name above.] It's not like they weren't aware of the security issues; you only found out about the commands above if you looked at the special manual (http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Acorn/Manuals/Acorn_Econet_AdvancedUG.pdf http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Acorn/Manual...). Or, you know, if you looked at the ROM, which had a handy list of all the commands in the table at the top. Did I mention that Econet was heavily used by schools? Oh, and the file server sent all authentication information over the wire in plain text, but if you got far enough into the system to realise this, you were already past the point where hashing the passwords would have been useful. It was a different age. To be fair, for the early 80s, Econet was pretty awesome. With care you could run it up to 60kB/s, which was blisteringly fast for an 8-bit system; faster than the BBC Micro's floppy disk, which was already pretty fast (10-20kB/s; C64 users would weep when they saw how fast a BBC Micro could load off disk); at the low level it supported multiple networks with bridging, individual machine addresses and ports, allowing you to write proper client/server code --- a printer server came as standard; the built-in network file system was superb, supporting multiple users with authentication and unix-like file permissions; and it was properly hierarchical, of course. Its comfort zones was big networks of BBC Micros (and, later, ARM machines) all talking to a central file server, and it did that pretty well. But secure it wasn't.