[TUHS] Happy New Year and an amusing story from the past

[Diomidis Spinellis]

On 03/01/2015 02:49, Ronald Natalie wrote:
> I asked if I should knock down the screen saver and he said sure go at it.

At the university we were a few hundred undergraduates using two VAX 
780s through about 40 serial terminals.  They were running 4.3BSD.  It 
was common for students who would leave their terminal for a few minutes 
to lock(1) it, so that others wouldn't mess with their account. 
Sometimes terminals were forgotten with the lock program running, and 
then a staff member would come, type some magic characters, and exit the 
lock program.  Through shoulder surfing a student had found that magic 
sequence, and some of us were led into this secret.  What we didn't know 
at the time, was that the magic character sequence was the root password.

#ifndef lint
static char sccsid[] = "@(#)lock.c      8.1 (Berkeley) 6/6/93";
#endif /* not lint */

/*
  * Lock a terminal up until the given key is entered, until the root
  * password is entered, or the given interval times out.
  *