Forum Overview :: Tansin A. Darcos's Alter Ego

Computer Crimes I have Committed: Replacing the system editor by Commander Tansin A. Darcos 05/18/2018, 3:57am PDT In the late 1970s and middle 1980s there were no computer crime laws on the books anywhere. I look back fondly on some of the stunts I pulled, that were not nasty, destructive, or malicious, but if they happened today would be serious felonies punishable by years in jail. Remember, a "computer crime" is unauthorized use of a computer, usage beyond the privileges you are granted, or accessing things you are not authorized. "In the distant land of unregulated computer use, there are three separate yet equal groups who worked with computers. The users who wanted things done, the programmers and operators who got things done, and the hackers who looked at what was being done and either tried to do things it was thought impossible, or to learn new things. These are their stories." Dun Dun. Another feature of the Univac 90/60 Mainframe running the VS/9 operating system was the way you accessed files. As with multi-user systems you have your own account and there is a System Account. Every account name began with a $ to differentiate from local files in your account. The system account is $TSOS fron the old name of VS/9 when it was an operating system for RCA mainframes, Time Sharing Operating System. (RCA blew half a billion 1970s dollars trying to compete against IBM in the mainframe business, then quitting and selling their inventory, schematics, and operating system to Univac.) The $TSOS account could also be referenced to by just dollar sign, $. The system editor, EDT, was probably the best text editor written. In fact, Univac's people claimed the only better editor was TECO from Digital Equipment Corporation. Now, to run a program, you typed in EXEC followed by the name of the program. If it was a compiled program you built in your own account, that's it. If it was in the system library you could access it in one of three ways. (1). Type $ before the name. (2) Type $TSOS. before the name. (3). If you did not have a file of the same name in your account directory, type just the name. VS/9 would look in the system library for it. So most users ran the editor by typing EXEC EDT which, since you didn't have a file called EDT in your directory, would run the system editor. One time I and one of the other students in the same programming class got into a bit of a disagreement over something. For the purposes of this story I'll call him Edgar Chapmann. Whenever you ran a program VS/9 would diswplay a message giving the 3-digit version number and 8-character name the programmer who built the application assigned it. So, when you typed EXEC EDT or EXEC $EDT you'd see a message like this: %E502 Loading version 002 of EDT at location 000000 before the program came up. Well, the system editor was a huge program, (huge by the standards of 1970s computing) so it was broken into modules. Executing the program loaded a small stub program that brought the full editor into memory. This made it load faster. Well, remember that it only ran programs from the system library if a program with the identical name was not stored in your account. So, what I did was to build a new version of EDT, that would show a different name. Then I stored it locally as "EDT" which meant everyone in that class that did not use EXEC $EDT got my program instead. So, when it loaded it gave a different message: %E502 Loading version DUM of CHAPMANN at location 000000

Computer Crimes I have Committed: Replacing the system editor by Commander Tansin A. Darcos 05/18/2018, 3:57am PDT