3 ms·

My highschool had a lab of these in the early 90's. I would spend every lunch hour up there. Got my first exposure to a unix command line, although the comman

My highschool had a lab of these in the early 90's. I would spend every lunch hour up there. Got my first exposure to a unix command line, although the commands were slightly different, ie. frel -> rm. I eventually figured out a few ways to give myself root. The passwords in the password file were not hashed. First method was to spoof the login prompt. Ran it remotely from another computer on another computer that I knew the teacher would always log into. Once I succeeded in getting root's password, I put another method into one of the boot up scripts which would copy the password file somewhere else if another file was present. All I had to do then was just reboot a computer to get root's password. Later I was able to figure out the memory location where the group and user number was stored by comparing the memory dumps while being logged in as various users. Then I just needed to poke those memory locations, start a new shell, and I was root. It's a shame that these computers have kind of disappeared. They are a part of computing history, for Ontario at least. I've contacted a few people online that still have hardware. Everyone seems to be unwilling to share what they have. To preserve the history, I think it would help if they could be emulated. Even a modern web browser probably possesses enough computer power to emulate them. They ran on a 286, at least the early ones did.

thijson 2y ago
The computers had a C compiler and Pascal interpreter made by Watcom out of Waterloo. QNX was the OS, which is also out of Waterloo I believe. So overall, the system supported a few Ontario based companies. There was a trackball integrated into the case. Some buttons on the keyboard acted as buttons for the mouse cursor. One of the most popular programs on these computers was a program called FGED. It would save animations that could be played back later. Some people would spend hours creating them, then later play them back for their friends. Later version of the ICON supported DOS games. I remember playing "scorched earth": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_Earth_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_Earth_(video_game)
- AstroJetson 2y ago
  They had the entire suite of Watcomm products: APL, Basic, Cobol, Fortran, Pascal. The Watcomm tools were great, there was some magical linker that let you connect Cobol and Fortran tools together. Burroughs was always big on being able to network computers together. Their B20 line was awesome on the amount of sharing you could do between systems. Lots of sites had one or two machines with disks on them, the rest would use the network to get to the data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_B20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_B20
  - thijson 2y ago
    I used the sharing ability to run the fake login program on another node. The syntax was something like: [12] fake_login Where 12 was the remote computer I wanted to run it on. The networking was definitely ahead of what was possible with PC's.

thijson 2y ago

The computers had a C compiler and Pascal interpreter made by Watcom out of Waterloo. QNX was the OS, which is also out of Waterloo I believe. So overall, the system supported a few Ontario based companies. There was a trackball integrated into the case. Some buttons on the keyboard acted as buttons for the mouse cursor. One of the most popular programs on these computers was a program called FGED. It would save animations that could be played back later. Some people would spend hours creating them, then later play them back for their friends. Later version of the ICON supported DOS games. I remember playing "scorched earth": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_Earth_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_Earth_(video_game)

AstroJetson 2y ago
They had the entire suite of Watcomm products: APL, Basic, Cobol, Fortran, Pascal. The Watcomm tools were great, there was some magical linker that let you connect Cobol and Fortran tools together. Burroughs was always big on being able to network computers together. Their B20 line was awesome on the amount of sharing you could do between systems. Lots of sites had one or two machines with disks on them, the rest would use the network to get to the data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_B20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_B20
- thijson 2y ago
  I used the sharing ability to run the fake login program on another node. The syntax was something like: [12] fake_login Where 12 was the remote computer I wanted to run it on. The networking was definitely ahead of what was possible with PC's.