[Info-vax] An alternative history of computing

[Andrew Commons]

On Sunday, 25 July 2021 at 9:59:01 pm UTC+9:30, Scott Dorsey wrote:

> 
> Back in the eighties, the attitudes toward locking down software were 
> rather different than they are today. Many manufacturers still thought 
> of operating systems as a free bonus they included to help them sell 
> hardware. Why would someone pirate it? They'd have to have a machine to 
> run it on anyway. 
> --scott 
> 
Back in the eighties DEC were certainly very relaxed about using stuff 
from the fiche. Password hashing was a good example. Clean room 
implementation was not possible because although the algorithm was 
public knowledge the little extras thrown in by DEC were only revealed 
in the fiche.

Nobody at DEC asked us how we implemented password cracking in Security
Toolkit even when we were running it on systems at Maynard.

We actually had two ways of doing it but both relied on having access 
to the fiche. One was to copy the code unmodified from the fiche and 
the other was to map an image that used it, I used SETP0, and execute 
the code from that. As it turned out I needn't have bothered with the 
SETP0 trick.