It is, if nothing else, a nice example of Moore's Law.

Here's a thing on the distribution tape (at least, I assume it was; happy to be wrong here) but which was assumed to be fundamentally safe, because it was computationally infeasible to rainbow-table the hash...so why not leave your real password hash on the images you gave to the world?

40 years later, it's obviously within the reach of hobbyists spending, I presume, essentially zero dollars to do the computational work (at least, I hope no one sunk more than a few bucks on doing it).

...which is why we went to salted passwords, and shadow pw files that hid the hashes while leaving the other fields available to all users, and more secure and longer hashes than original crypt(1), quite some time ago.

In fact there's an interesting little essay about the history of that arms race up until about 33 years ago in the 1986 Unix System Manager's Manual, Section 18.  It's by two guys named Morris and Thompson.