I used to keep a vt100 at the head of my bed, roll over and check on things a few times at night. 3am and everything is screwed. can't really log in anyplace, or start any jobs. The bus doesn't run until 5:30, so I just get dressed and walk across the bridge the to lab. Visitors center isn't open, so I just sneak through the exit by the guardhouse. They're civilian contractors, they either don't see me, or recognize me and don't care.
Since it's all locked up, I just reboot the big vax single user - that takes about 10 minutes so I also start on a couple of the suns. You have to realize that everything including desktops runs sendmail in this era, and when some of these machines come up they are ok for a sec and then sendmail starts really eating into the cpu.
I'm pretty bleary eyed but I walk around restarting everything single and taking sendmail out of the rcs. The TMC applications engineer comes in around 7 and gets me a cup of coffee. He manages to get someone to pick up in Cambridge and they tell him that's happening everywhere.
RTM was my TA at MIT for a CS/systems engineering course. It took the students until we did an assignment about the worm to realize who he was IIRC. The students thought it was very cool, but even then, as a TA covering the assignment, he didn't really talk about it.
He was also a TA at Harvard with Trevor Blackwell for CS 148 (computer networking, taught by H T Kung) at the time. I remember taking that with them in 1995.
Account "guest" with no password was provided by default back then, to help others do some work remotely, debug connection issues, or chat with admins.
Sadly, not much. My shitty job working on legacy systems doesn't really allow me to use it professionally. Still, I got a much better perspective on concurrency and systems in general, and when I occasionally see articles/videos about system design questions I could understand what they are talking about, which probably will be handy when the day arrives.
I have a colleague who suggested that I could look at open source projects on distributed systems and get my hands wet, although I haven't had a chance to do that due to time constraints. Maybe something you could consider.
I assume you all know that Robert Morris is one of the YC (and Viaweb) cofounders? [1] Together with Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, and Trevor Blackwell.
I knew Robert Morris was the financier of the Revolution. I know it's a plucky university outside of Pittsburgh with basketball and hockey programs that punch above their weight. I know there's a pastor in Texas who is...in some legal trouble...with the same name.
A good account is With Microscope and Tweezers: The Worm from MIT's Perspective [1], published in CACM a few months after the event. Notice it was the worm.
I was an intern at IBM in '88 and they shut-down the (iirc) two internet getaways to their corporate network (vnet) while people figured out what was going on. News moved slowly back then, and the idea of self-replicating software was unusual. Although IBM had had its own replicator the previous year [2].
True. I should probably have qualified that to something like "independently self-replicating". Floppy-disk based viruses obviously still required humans in the transmission path, whereas the Morris Worm and its successors were novel in that they used the internet and worked without human intervention.
Memories of adding an illicit McAffee to autoexec.bat on my boot floppies...
When i worked at Convex, there was an unnatural mania that fingerd be disabled and all sendmail patches be applied as quickly as possible. When I asked why, the answer started with "well... a couple of years ago there was this guy from the east coast who worked here for a year..."
The 10% number is completely made up. According to Paul Graham, "I was there when this statistic was cooked up, and this was the recipe: someone guessed that there were about 60,000 computers attached to the Internet, and that the worm might have infected ten percent of them."
That figure is probably UUCP mostly not live connected hosts. I could be wrong, but 60k hosts that you could telnet to sounds like a lot of ducking hosts back then. I was there too, in my late teens. God bless PG.
Yeah and a 'host' back then wasn't a cheap PC or something, they tended to be $30000 workstations or $300000 servers. At tech companies and Universities only, and mostly in the US. 60k sounds like a lot for those days. It grew massively from the early 90s.
Even UUCP was still really fringe and those weren't actually connected hosts on tcp/ip. They had their own dialup mail exchange protocol similar to fidonet.
That day our tech chief at the time came running and told us about the worm, and that apparently our country managed to avoid it because the news spread quickly enough that one guy simply unplugged the whole country from the Internet - there was only a single connection back then. (!)
I'm pretty sure Paul Graham was directly involved in this story (not in any bad, culpable way, but enough that, were a film to be made about it, a well-known actor would be cast for his part).
There's contemporaneous reporting. It's in Katie Hafner and John Markoff's book! A friend of Morris', named Paul, has a role in the aftermath of the worm.
I'm not dunking on Paul Graham here. If you know anything about me, if anything, this is a point in his favor. :)
Readit News
Since it's all locked up, I just reboot the big vax single user - that takes about 10 minutes so I also start on a couple of the suns. You have to realize that everything including desktops runs sendmail in this era, and when some of these machines come up they are ok for a sec and then sendmail starts really eating into the cpu.
I'm pretty bleary eyed but I walk around restarting everything single and taking sendmail out of the rcs. The TMC applications engineer comes in around 7 and gets me a cup of coffee. He manages to get someone to pick up in Cambridge and they tell him that's happening everywhere.
Great course by the way.
Dead Comment
username: field
password: technician
On a sidenote, what did you do after the course?
It is an amazing course though!
I have a colleague who suggested that I could look at open source projects on distributed systems and get my hands wet, although I haven't had a chance to do that due to time constraints. Maybe something you could consider.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rtm
I knew Robert Morris was the financier of the Revolution. I know it's a plucky university outside of Pittsburgh with basketball and hockey programs that punch above their weight. I know there's a pastor in Texas who is...in some legal trouble...with the same name.
Now I have another one to remember!
I was an intern at IBM in '88 and they shut-down the (iirc) two internet getaways to their corporate network (vnet) while people figured out what was going on. News moved slowly back then, and the idea of self-replicating software was unusual. Although IBM had had its own replicator the previous year [2].
[1] https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~gskc/security/rochlis89microsco...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_Tree_EXEC
floppy based viruses were well established and quite common
Memories of adding an illicit McAffee to autoexec.bat on my boot floppies...
The Mac's ease of use as opposed to the PC made it also the juiciest virus target.
Even UUCP was still really fringe and those weren't actually connected hosts on tcp/ip. They had their own dialup mail exchange protocol similar to fidonet.
Dead Comment
Not much was happening in the Eng and CS buildings on campus (except for those that had to deal with the worm).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38020635
I'm not dunking on Paul Graham here. If you know anything about me, if anything, this is a point in his favor. :)