The point about WCHAR size reminded me of how little browser security mattered back then. Kinda interesting to think about how the internet was so fresh that there wasn't such a focus on a secure application. I wonder how many buffer over/underflow exploits were completely ignored.
Danny Hillis gives a great talk called "The Internet could crash. We need a Plan B"[0]. In the talk, outside of security, he was talking about the culture of the early internet. It was really interesting, he said he still has a phonebook sized book of email addresses. He registered the 2nd domain on the entire internet (i think it was symbology but maybe that was the first) and he could have whatever he wanted. He summed up the culture of the time as, "then I realized it would be great to have a couple other domain names, but I thought that wouldn't be very nice"[approximated].
edit: Sorry forgot to make the point. Paul Graham says it in the Pycon 08' talk, it was built for guys at Bell labs to ask one another to get lunch. The people on the early internet were often scientists, engineers and academics and thus had mutual respect for one another. Stallman talks about not even having passwords on stuff, these were academics who were personally or professionally friendly so security wasn't at the forefront of the design.
As for the security, it was actually quite unusual that the ITS operating system machines he, Stallman, etc. used had essentially no security, just obscurity, although a password system did have to be added by the end of the '70s. The threat environment was certainly much much less back then, but computer time was very dear, and the most common paradigm required explicit budgeting, accounts that kept track of each CPU second used, etc. One reason PCs became so popular, their bigger engineering workstation brothers, etc. And plenty of people were thinking about security, e.g. see the Multics project.
> Which he personally did not like at all due to its role in suppressing use of Macsyma outside of its machines.
Symbolics offered Macsyma on other platforms.
Anyway Hillis' problems with Symbolics can't have been very deep, since Thinking Machines used Symbolics Lisp Machines extensively and offered them commercially as frontends for the Connection Machine.
> As for the security, it was actually quite unusual that the ITS operating system machines he, Stallman, etc. used had essentially no security
Stallman was reading other people's mails and he was threatening to sabotage other people, wasn't he?
Eventually, I assume. But when they got the licence they tracked down every copy of VAXSYMA and demanded the org stop using it and return/destroy all of the IP. And while I'm not familiar with the long term history of Macsyma at Symbolics, there's lots of talk about the reluctance of those outside its unit to sell or push it on non-Symbolics Lisp Machine platforms. As far as I know, it wasn't available for LMI's LAMBDA or TI's Explorer, although perhaps that changed as Symbolics' fortunes declined.
My reading on Danny's take on Symbolics comes from when I was working for LMI in the September 1982 to June 1983 period. Due to the ADL/Symbolics single source licencing scam (which also, I'll note, cut out Joel Moses, the "father" of it and others, something he was still unhappy about at the end of the '80s), he didn't want to buy from Symbolics, and asked me if there was any chance LMI could deliver in the time frame he needed for the founding of Thinking Machines, which was incorporated in 1993.
I regretfully had to tell him there was no way that would happen (success was not even in the picture until I recruited a extremely talented classmate right after he graduated in 1983), so they bought ~6 3600s to get the company off the ground (in part limited by the power available in their interim Watham office), and as you note, it was one of the front ends you could buy for the original formula Connection Machines (in black trade dress to fit with their stunning industrial design). Understandably, he wasn't willing to give up on his Comnection Machine dream because of Symbolics's behavior at that time.
Stallman was reading other people's mails and he was threatening to sabotage other people, wasn't he?
"Everybody" read other's emails, Joel Moses' was particularly fascinating. Of course there was an ethos about what you'd do with that information, and one I can see RMS violating.
But the only sabotage rumor I heard was WRT to a conflict he was said to have with Dan Weinreb. As the story went, on the basis of a technical dispute WRT to the Lisp Machine's software, RMS threatened to not only delete all live copies of this bit of Dan's code, but also their copies on backup tapes. Dan's response was to accept a job in Livermore, CA to work on the ambitious S-1 project (this looks good, just skimmed a bit of it: https://forum.stanford.edu/wiki/index.php/S1_project), which had very strong connections with this MIT community (the Chaosnet actually extended all the way over to it, I forget which is which, the other end was the most geographically east node in the MIT EECS machine room, one Trantor, the other Terminus), and for example GCC started with a failed port of its Pastel compiler.
When Dan returned, he flatly denied the rumor, and I found him credible, especially since threatening to mess with ITS backup tapes like that was a cardinal sin.
Lessor methods of sabotage, certainly obstruction, would certainly fit with RMS's style, but I can't remember hearing of any significant examples. And I'll note his response to all this craziness was to do GNU/the FSF, which was ideologically aggressive, but otherwise constructive. We are, after all, people who make things, not destroy them.
Note on my (claimed) credibility: I was on first name business with all of the people I've named in this post, was even a roommate of RMS when he launched the GNU Project.
This was really interesting. Thanks. His talk was fascinating and really opened my eyes to a lot of stuff. I was a bit foggy on some of the details of course, but imagine a culture where you only took what you needed. I thought that bit was really interesting. Rarely am I early, but if I get in on a service well before others I think about this and only register a single acct.
I was a bit foggy on some of the details of course, but imagine a culture where you only took what you needed.
That was indeed the culture of ITS, but it was mediated by very competent and humane admins. The nature of AI research meant that there were times some would need to pretty much take over the machine to do something hard, or quasi-real time (e.g. robotics, or a demo). So this was allowed, but e.g. I remember ... Jeff Schiller, I think it was, telling about how someone upped the priority of a long computation on MIT-MC too high, and rather than kill it and lose what it had accomplished up to that point, they set it to a lower priority (which, I note, anyone with the requisite system knowledge could do) so it wouldn't interfere with other users, and then educated the user about how to politely accomplish his goals (e.g. MIT-MC had a lot of spare cycles at times, it was bloody fast by the time dawn broke, and logged in from the VT-52 in the middle of it I could see lights advance every time I typed in a character).
