Hello! Good! When I read the book for the first time, I was surprised. Both at the fink's lack of talent in how to talk to a PDP-10's OS (any) and then his talents for doing things that most of us would want to do one way or the other. And naturally not do because its really not legal....... Dave is that system running? Or is it shutdown and waiting? ----- You then see a crowd of yetis and a bigger crowd of snow leopards at work, at a machine. You see your available bandwidth shrink and then realize that's what they are using. ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again." On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 6:05 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: On 09/23/2013 05:56 PM, Pontus wrote: I found the passage in the book, page 107 in this edition, sadly it doesn't say much :( <quote> Instead, I sat and watched the hacker deliberately connect to the MX computer, a PDP-10 at the MIT artificial intelligence labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He logged in as user Litwin and spent almost an hour learning how to operate that computer. He seemed quite unaccustomed to the MIT system, and he'd frequently ask for the automated help facility. In an hour, he'd learned little more than how to list files. Perhaps because artificial intelligence research is so arcane, he didn't find much. Certainly the antique operating system didn't provide much protection - any user could read anyone else's files. But the hacker didn't realize this. The sheer impossibility of understanding this system protected their information. </quote> "Sheer impossibility" - makes me think ITS :) Further on he comes back to the PDP-10: It's very likely that that very computer is here. Two of the three PDP-10s from the MIT AI Lab are here. http://www.neurotica.com/misc/DECsystem-2020s.jpg The (original from MIT) handwritten label on the front of the rightmost one says "This is ML.AI, an ITS". -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA