Dave Horsfall:
And for those who slagged me off for calling him an idiot, try this quick
quiz: on a scale from utter moron to sheer genius, what do you call
someone who deliberately releases untested software designed to compromise
machines that are not under his administrative control in order to make
some sort of a point?
=====
I'd call that careless and irresponsible. Calling it stupid or
idiotic is, well, a stupid, idiotic simplification that succeeds
in being nasty without showing any understanding of the real problem.
Carelessness and irresponsibility are characteristic of people
in their late teens and early 20s, i.e. Robert's age at the time.
Many of us are overly impressed with our own brilliance at that
age, and even when we take some care (as I think Robert did) we
don't always take enough (as he certainly didn't).
Anyone who claims not to have been at least a bit irresponsible
and careless when young is, in my opinion, not being honest. Some
of my former colleagues at Bell Labs weren't always as careful and
responsible as they should be, even to the point of causing harm
to others. But to their credit, when they screwed up that way they
owned up to having done so, tried to make amends, and tried to do
better in future, just as Robert did. It was just Robert's bad
luck that he screwed up in such a public way and did harm to so
many people.
I save my scorn for those who are long past that age and still
behave irresponsibly and harmfully, like certain high politicians
and certain high-tech executives.
Probably future discussion of this should move to COFF unless it
relates directly to the culture and doings in 1127 or other historic
UNIX places.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Sent to me by someone not on this list; I have no idea whether it's been
mentioned here before.
-- Dave
---------- Forwarded message ----------
To: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org>
Subject: Unix Programmer's Manual, 3rd edition (1973)
Hi Dave,
Some nostalgic soul has shared a PDF on the interwebz:
> MIT CSAIL (@MIT_CSAIL) tweeted at 3:12 am on Mon, Nov 04, 2019:
> #otd in 1971 Bell Labs released the first Unix Programmers Manual.
>
> Download the free PDF here: https://t.co/BYh3dAhaJU
I wonder what became of the first and second editions?
> From: Nemo Nusquam
> One comment .. stated that (s)he worked at The Bell and they wrote it
> "unix" (lower-case) to distinguish it from MULTICS. Anyone care to
> comment on this?
All the original Multics hardcopy documentation I have (both from GE and MIT,
as well as later material from Honeywell) spells it 'Multics'. Conversely, an
original V6 UPM spells it 'UNIX'; I think it switched to 'Unix' around the
time of V7. (I don't know about _really_ early, like on the PDP-7.)
The bit about case to differentiate _might_ be right.
Noel
I may still have AOS 4.3 tape images still around somewhere. I will have
to search around and see if I still have them. Though even if I do, I'm
not sure if the license would permit me to make them available - if I
recall correctly, this wasn't an actual LPP, but there may be some IBM
license on this over and above the Berkeley license. Yes, it did come on
tape cartridges.
--Pat.
Another possible source of inspiration — including the name “worm” — were the publications by John Shoch and Jon Hupp on programs they wrote at Xerox PARC around 1979-1980 and published in 1980 and 1982:
John F. Shoch and Jon Hupp:
The “Worm" Programs — Early Experience with a Distributed Computation.
Xerox SSL-80-3 and IEN 159. May 1980, revised September 1980
http://www.postel.org/ien/pdf/ien159.pdf
John F. Shoch and Jon Hupp:
The “Worm" Programs — Early Experience with a Distributed Computation.
CACM V25 N3 (March 1982)
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~margo/cs261/background/shoch.pdf
> On Nov 3, 2019, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 11/2/19, Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com <mailto:imp@bsdimp.com>> wrote:
>>
>> the notion of a self propagating thing
>> was quite novel (even if it had been theoretically discussed in many places
>> prior to the worm, and even though others had proven it via slower moving
>> vectors of BBS).
>
> Novel to the Internet community, perhaps, but an idea that dates back
> to the 1960s in IBM mainframe circles. Self-submitting OS/360 JCL
> jobs, which eventually caused a crash by filling the queue files with
> jobs, were well-known in the raised-floor world.
>
>> In hindsight people like to point at it and what a terrible thing it was,
>> but Robert just got there first.
>
> Again, first on the Internet. Back in 1980 I accidentally took down
> DEC's internal engineering network (about 100 nodes, mostly VAX/VMS,
> at the time) with a worm. ...
>
> Robert Morris worked as an intern one summer in DEC's compiler group.
> The Fortran project leader told Morris about my 1980 worm incident.
> So he certainly had heard of the concept before he fashioned his
> UNIX/Internet-based worm a few years later.
>
> -Paul W.
All, the second Unix artifact that I've been waiting to announce has
arrived. This time the LCM+L is announcing it. It's not the booting PDP-7.
So, cast your eyes on https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/IBM/370/
Cheers, Warren
P.S Thanks to Stephen Jones for this as well.
Full disclosure: I served as a character witness at Robert Morris's trial.
Before the trial, the judge was quite incredulous that the prosecutor
was pursuing a felony charge and refused to let the trial go forward
without confirmation from the prosecutor's superiors in Washington.
> I'm sure that Bob was proud of his son's accomplishments -- but not
that one.
As Bob ut it, "It {being the father] is not a great career move."
Robert confessed to Bob as soon as he realized the folly of loosing
an exponential, even with a tiny growth rate per generation. I
believe that what brought computers to their knees was the
overwhelming number of attacks, not the cost of cecryption. The
worm did assure that only one copy would be allowed to proceed
at a time.
During high school, Robert worked as a summer employee for Fred
Grampp. He got high marks for finding and correcting an exploit.
> making use of known vulnerabilities
Buffer overflows were known to cause misbehavior, but few people
at the time were conscious that the misbehavior could be controlled.
I do not know whether Berkeley agonized before distributing the
"debug" feature that allowed remote super-user access via sendmail.
But they certainly messed up by not documenting it.
Doug
