I wonder if such a thing would have been treated the same way within Bell Labs as outside?

Presumably you didn't have to worry about hordes of undergraduates picking over your systems looking for ways to get root access. Or, indeed, undergraduates doing anything on your systems, save for the occasional intern or precocious child of an employee. For that matter, this raises a question: what was the attitude towards root access within the labs? Was it constrained to the anointed few or did a large-ish number of people have it?

Anyway, I could well imagine a scenario where Dennis comes back but thinks fairly little of it and makes vague mention of a fairly serious bug but gives it little more thought than any other fairly serious bug. It's patched and folks go on with their lives, since it's much less likely to be the source of irritation in a corporate search department than it would be in, say, a university.

        - Dan C.