[Gllug] The BBC and Microsoft.

[tet at accucard.com]

>The closest I can remember was the 'Econet' system. It required a ROM chip
>(usually 32K, IIRC) with program code, that allowed connection a common file
>server on Winchester discs. It had a heirachical file system, user
>authentication, a root user (called system), and talk/message system.
>Probably more akin to NFS than Linux as a whole, though, since all
>processing was done on the individual machine.

Hideously insecure, though. It trusted the client to identify itself
using a station number. That station numebr was held in a fixed address,
and was user modifiable, so anyone could just type ?&D22=xyz at the
prompt to become station number xyz. Hilarity ensued if you chose the
station ID of the server (254 on our network).

Also, there was no OS protection, so anyone that could get hold of the
system binary could use it to get superuser rights. I used to carry
around a copy on disk :-) Unlike Unix, there was no concept of not
having permission to make a system call to elevate user privileges. If
you had posession of the binary, you could run it.

Tet

PS. How is it that I can't remember what I'm supposed to be doing today,
    or even what I did yesterday, yet I can remember the memory address
    of an Econet station ID some 13 years later?

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