Re: [TUHS] Of login (and host) names

Google was not the first place Rob and Dave had fun with names. At one point, Rob had a duplicate entry in /etc/passwd, with login name r, password empty, normal userid/groupid/home directory, special shell. The shell program checked whether it was running on a particular host and a particular hardwired serial line: if yes, it ran the program that started the Research version of the window system for our bitmapped terminals; otherwise it just exited. The idea seemed to be to let him log in quickly in his office. I think that by the time I arrived at Bell Labs he'd stopped using it, because it no longer worked, because we no longer ran serial lines directly from computers to offices--everyone was connected via serial-port Datakit instead. While I was there, senior management bought a Cray X-MP/24 for the research group. (Thank you for using AT&T.) Since it too was accessible via Datakit (using a custom hardware interface built by Alan Kaplan, but that's another story), it had to have a hostname. It was either Dave or Rob, I forget which, who suggested 3k, because (a) it was a supercomputer, so `big bang' seemed to fit; (b) it was Arno Penzias, then VP for Research, who got us the money, so `big bang' and 3K radiation seemed even more appropriate; and, most important, (c) it was fun to see whether a hostname beginning with a digit broke anything. So far as I recall, nothing broke. Some people who were involved with TCP/IP networking at the labs were frightened about it; I don't remember whether that Cray was ever connected to an IP network so I don't know whether anything went wrong there. Of course such names are not a problem today, but in those long-lost days when nobody worried much about buffer overflows either, such bugs were much more common. Weren't they? Norman Wilson Toronto ON