On Sun, Oct 3, 2021 at 3:55 PM Will Senn <will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote: Operator was for people that 'operated' the computers. The name came from a group on TOPS-20. The operator could do things normal users couldn't, like restart stalled print jobs, run backups to mag tape and a few other normal 'house keeping' duties that these old machines needed. In BSD, it serves much the same purpose. It's a way to grant a little bit of privilege to an otherwise normal account that falls short of root. This grew out of the days before the personal computer revolution where the machine was massive (in terms of size), served a lot of people (via dumb terminals), and needed constant care and feeding that you'd delegate to undergrad technitians who needed work study money... In general, using groups to control permissions has fallen out of style. There's a few around still like operator and wheel that control some things, or have elevated privs due to being able to open files others can't. At one point, it was well documented in the FreeBSD handbook, but I'm not seeing it right away in a quick search.