5 ms·

I cracked "root" on ours as an undergrad, so going to claim that the security wasn't all that, at least lacking a perfect operator. (And didn't they distribute

I cracked "root" on ours as an undergrad, so going to claim that the security wasn't all that, at least lacking a perfect operator. (And didn't they distribute it with vendor backdoors for a long time?) Beyond that, AFAIK it didn't have pipes, which was a real limitation for creating, well, pipelines to stream process data far larger than available RAM. I miss the days, but not the OS.

dboreham 7y ago
Somewhere I have a printout (green ruled 132-column line printer of course) of the SYS$SYSTEM:SYSUAF.DAT file showing my account with all 32 privilege bits set (including of course: "change mode to kernel"). This after spending the weekend writing a perfect VT-100 "trojan" that I left running on an operator terminal with some social engineering, grabbing the system user password which I then used to escalate my account's privileges. Coincidentally, a few minutes later, the 780 threw a fatal memory error and shut down. My 17 year old self assumed he had broken the VAX, returning to work (I was an intern) on Monday morning expecting to be fired. Writing the trojan, which had to correctly implement all the terminal timeouts, responses to ctl-y and so on, was quite a challenge. Required me to understand $QIO, by reading the microfiche copy of the terminal handler BLISS-32 source code.
metaphor 7y ago
Pipes wasn't a thing until v7.something or other. A bunch of lexical functions weren't implemented until then too.
- monocasa 7y ago
  Pipes very much existed before v7. At a bare minimum they're in v6 as I remember them from Lyon's, but I think they were as far back as v3.
  - metaphor 7y ago
    Yeah, sure...from § 11.13.2 of TFM[1]: > In OpenVMS Version 7.1, the DCL PIPE command was introduced. Ask me how I really know OpenVMS v6 doesn't have pipes. [1] http://h30266.www3.hpe.com/odl/axpos/opsys/vmsos84/6489/6489pro_029.html http://h30266.www3.hpe.com/odl/axpos/opsys/vmsos84/6489/6489...
    - monocasa 7y ago
      I thought you were talking about Unix, hence my Lyon's comment.
      - metaphor 7y ago
        I thought the GP's context made that clear, but fair enough.

dboreham 7y ago

Somewhere I have a printout (green ruled 132-column line printer of course) of the SYS$SYSTEM:SYSUAF.DAT file showing my account with all 32 privilege bits set (including of course: "change mode to kernel"). This after spending the weekend writing a perfect VT-100 "trojan" that I left running on an operator terminal with some social engineering, grabbing the system user password which I then used to escalate my account's privileges. Coincidentally, a few minutes later, the 780 threw a fatal memory error and shut down. My 17 year old self assumed he had broken the VAX, returning to work (I was an intern) on Monday morning expecting to be fired. Writing the trojan, which had to correctly implement all the terminal timeouts, responses to ctl-y and so on, was quite a challenge. Required me to understand $QIO, by reading the microfiche copy of the terminal handler BLISS-32 source code.

metaphor 7y ago

Pipes wasn't a thing until v7.something or other. A bunch of lexical functions weren't implemented until then too.

monocasa 7y ago
Pipes very much existed before v7. At a bare minimum they're in v6 as I remember them from Lyon's, but I think they were as far back as v3.
- metaphor 7y ago
  Yeah, sure...from § 11.13.2 of TFM[1]: > In OpenVMS Version 7.1, the DCL PIPE command was introduced. Ask me how I really know OpenVMS v6 doesn't have pipes. [1] http://h30266.www3.hpe.com/odl/axpos/opsys/vmsos84/6489/6489pro_029.html http://h30266.www3.hpe.com/odl/axpos/opsys/vmsos84/6489/6489...
  - monocasa 7y ago
    I thought you were talking about Unix, hence my Lyon's comment.
    - metaphor 7y ago
      I thought the GP's context made that clear, but fair enough.