The Complete Adventures of the Lone Perkins -- Glossary
- ACCT.SHR
-
The password file. This was the holy grail of hacking, as it contained the passwords for
all of the accounts on the system, in plain text. The concept of encrypting passwords was
invented during this time. Greg Walsh (Gralsh), in an effort to stop our hacking, implemented
encrypted passwords after reading about it in a journal.
- AID
-
A interpretive calculation language, much like UNIX /bin/bc. (Thanks, trb!)
- BLOCK
-
512 36 bit words of disk storage. Each student normally had a quota of 100. If you were
good, and asked nicely, you could get more.
- BOOTS
-
Bootstrap paper tape. Used to bootstrap the system if the disk bootstrap blocks were corrupted.
When one of my Friday night hacks went slightly awry and blew away the bootstrap blocks along
with the system, boots got shreaded when they were trying to restart the system. Unfortunately,
there were no other copies at WPI. The system remained down until Monday, when a new copy could
be obtained from DEC headquarters. To guard against this happening again, they made a copy of
boots on mylar tape, and expelled me from WPI.
- BOYNTON PIZZA
-
The local pizza joint, where many a hack was planned. The nearest Chinese restaurant was too
far away for those without cars.
- CAN
-
Cancel a user's account. Standard punishment for getting caught hacking.
- CONSOLE LIGHTS
-
The DEC-10 console had literally hundreds of blinking lights and switches, which were used
to monitor and control its operation. If the system crashed, the console terminal was
often unusable, so the cause of the crash had to be determined from the lights. We
often amused ourselves by attempting to display derogatory messages in the lights while the
system was running.
- CORE
-
Core memory. Semiconductor memory wasn't quite available yet, so each bit of memory was
implemented by a small donut-shaped piece of ferro-magnetic material strung on wires.
The DEC-10 initially had 128K 36 bit words of core, which occupied 4 refrigerator-size
boxes.
- DAEMON
-
Background system job, much like those used by UNIX.
- DATAPOINT 3300
-
An early video terminal. They had green phospher and went "fweep" rather than having a
bell like the Teletypes.
- DDT
-
Dynamic Debugging Tool. The standard DEC-10 debugger. It was not a source-level debugger,
you had to work with machine opcodes and octal numbers.
- DECTAPE
-
The floppy disk of the era. These were small reels of tape that could be randomly accessed.
I managed to illicitly acquire several cases of them, and paid for gas and donuts by selling
them for $5 each to the other students. Unfortunately, some of them were LINCtapes, which
looked identical to, but were slightly shorter than, DECtapes. The DECtape driver would
sometimes fail to sense the end of the shorter tape, resulting in the tape unraveling onto
the floor.
- DECSYSTEM-10
-
Digital Equipment Corporation's (now known simply as Digital) timesharing mainframe computer, a later
classier name for what was originally called the PDP-10. WACCC's was a large system, it
was capable of comfortably handling 64 users simultaneously. WPI was fairly unique at the
time in offering unlimited access to all students (Dartmouth was the only other school with
similar policies).
- DOCTOR
-
A famous "AI" program developed at MIT, which simulated conversing with a psychiatrist. A version
of it lives on in the EMACS text editor.
- DRUM
-
Before there were disks there were drums. Drums were large steel cylinders with ferro-magnetic
coatings. The DEC-10 had a head-per-track drum, which meant there was a recording head for each
track of recorded information, resulting in 0 seek time (but you still had to wait for the desired
bits to rotate into position). This was used as the swap device (where
the jobs lived when not in memory, this was before virtual memory became popular), as it was
much faster than the movable head disks of the time. Drums were rather fragile, and tended to
have physical head crashes if disturbed.
- FOROTS
-
FORTRAN Object Time System. (Thanks again, trb!)
- KEYPUNCH
-
All of the Computer Science courses at WPI required use of the dreaded Spectra batch computer (the
professors were more comfortable with it). You actually had to punch your programs into a deck
of cards, 1 line per card, and hand them to the operator. Minutes, hours, or occasionally days
later, you would get back the deck of cards and a printout of the output (which, more often
than not, consisted of a bunch of syntax error messages).
- MACRO
-
Macro assembler language. C hadn't quite escaped from Bell Labs, so nearly all hacks were
done in assembly language.
- MINASIAN
-
John Minasian. Ed Perkin's predecessor as Manager of Operations, and the arch nemesis of all hackers.
He orchestrated my expulsion from WPI.
- MONITOR
-
Operating system. The 507 monitor was the definitive version, sort of the Windows 3.1 for the DEC-10.
- NOTICE.TXT
-
The message of the day file, it's contents were printed when you logged in. A favored hacking
trick was to replace this file with something more interesting.
- PAPER TAPE
-
If you couldn't afford a DECtape, you had to store your DEC-10 programs on paper tape.
There were low-speed (10 character per second) reader and punch units on some of the
model 33 Teletypes around the campus. If you were in a real hurry, there was a
high-speed unit on the console which could read or punch at a blazing 100 characters
per second.
- PPN
-
Project Programmer Number. The equivalent of a user name on a DEC-10, it consisted of a pair
of 18 bit octal numbers. Mine was 1000,6735.
- SIXBIT
-
An alternate character encoding scheme, similar to ASCII, but only using 6 bits per character.
It dispensed with such luxurys as lower case characters. DEC computers often used it, as
6 bit characters fit nicely into the 12, 18, and 36 bit word lengths of their computers.
- SLIDE RULE
-
While calculators were available by this time (the first Bomars and HPs had just come out),
they could only be afforded by the richest of students. The rest of us had slide rules.
I finally built a Sinclair (yes, that Sinclair) scientific calculator from a kit, it displayed
all results in scientific notation, and had 4 1/2 digits of precision.
- SOS
-
An inferior line-oriented text editor used by freshmen and mechanical engineering majors.
The enlightened used TECO, a cryptic character-oriented programmable editor.
- SPECTRA
-
WACCC's other computer was an RCA (later UNIVAC) Spectra mainframe. This was an
IBM System 370 clone that ran an entirely incompatible operating system. Students were
only allowed batch access to the machine. All of the administrative data processing for WPI
and the other colleges in the area was done on this system. The batch access was somewhat
of a deterent to hacking, but we did try to slip an occasional hack into our program decks.
- STRATTON TERMINAL ROOM
-
Located in the building that contained the Computer Science department, the Stratton terminal
room and WACCC contained the only terminals that were accessible to students 24 hours a day.
This was the favored spot for hacking, as there were no computer operators there to monitor
the actvities.
- SYSTAT
-
System Status program. Used to print out the status of the jobs on the system. While systat
was a user program, it ran in a privileged state, since it needed access to protected system
tables. It was discovered that if you could get it to crash, its privileges would persist
for one additional command. This was the mechanism used for my first hacks.
- TELETYPE
-
An electro-mechanical keyboard/printer combination which was used to access the DEC-10. They
were made by the Teletype Corporation, which was part of The Phone Company (there was only one
then). Some of them had paper tape reader/punches, which let you save copies of your programs.
The cheaper model 33s printed 10 characters per second, the coveted model 35s printed 30 cps. They
were all eventually replaced by first-generation video terminals which could display an 80 by 24
screen of characters at an amazing 960 cps.
- THIRTEENTH OF SEPTEMBER
-
September 13th, 1974.
- TTY0
-
The console terminal, which sat next to the CPU. This terminal was unique in that anyone
who logged onto it had operator privileges. Since it was located in the computer room,
direct access was difficult. However, when the original teletype was replaced by a video
terminal, it was discovered that by sending a series of properly formatted messages to the
operator (who was hopefully asleep) and terminating the last one with the "transmit screen"
character, you could issue privileged commands from anywhere. Unfortunately, one night one of the
junior hackers failed to send a "clear screen" character afterwards.
- UFD
-
User File Directory.
- WACCC
-
Worcester Area College Computation Center. WACCC was located in the basement of WPI's
library, and supplied computation services to many of the colleges in Worcester,
including Clark University and Holy Cross. Later, as the price of computers dropped, the
other colleges were able to afford their own, and WACCC simply became WPI's computer center.
- WATFOR
-
Waterloo FORTRAN compiler. This was a batch compiler for a simplified dialect of
FORTRAN, used by freshmen and physics majors.