I can't conceive of a world where "there should be no passwords" or "keep these machines security-free" were ever serious positions held by software engineers. It's Garden of Eden thinking.
It wasn't a rationally-considered position, it was a reaction against the strict hierarchy and batch processing mentality of the time. (Disclaimer: everything I know about this I learned from Stephen Levy's book Hackers.) The admins of these machines would flaunt their power over the users, and were very antagonistic toward the hackers who wanted to do "cool" stuff on the computers. So, keeping the machines security-free and not allowing passwords was actually necessary to promote the idea that anyone could run a program on the computer, because that was not the status quo.
The fear that someone would take control and abuse power in that way was not an unfounded one.
Right, perhaps it was a different time, but you need to limit the power of most users, especially in a school setting, or you cannot maintain the uptime of the system for everyone.
I know in our computer lab in high school, which was a series of x86 PCs donated by Novell and sharing files from a Netware file server (this was 1989-1990), we used to try to get superuser privileges on the Netware server. Once or twice, the 20 year old kid they hired as a sysadmin would walk away from his desk and forget to logout of his workstation, and we would give ourselves superuser privileges on the network. We would use this privilege to play "Snipes," one of the first network based multiplayer text shooter games. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snipes
This fun lasted for a few hours until the 20 year old sysadmin determined we had superuser privs that we shouldn't have and promptly revoked our rights.
ha ha - that's funny.
We had a very similar setup at the same time - the workstations were "diskless" and the only way to get software onto the machine was to write it (in Turbo Pascal). The workstations were 8086's while the file server was a 286, and the other server was a (then very expensive) 386.
But the admins had installed "NetWork Eye" - sort of like a VNC for text monitors. So one guy in the class wrote an assembler (in TP) then got a NetBios book and wrote some low-level NetBios stuff in assembler. That allowed us to NetWork-Eye the servers to get some other funky stuff done.
One thing we did was to login on all 50 workstations (except one), and run the network eye in a cascaded chain. Then sit back and watch the first person come in. They're log in (on all 50 monitors simultaneously) and everything they did would come up on all 50. Usually took a few minutes before they noticed...
That's similar to how parents can't think of a world where they would let their unprotected child walk 500 meters to the school nearby.
Those system did not have network access at first and when they finally did most of the people on the net at the time were know (small community) and peer pressure kept people in line. ITS had a easy command that would kill and shutdown the machine. This took all the fun out of hacking the machine and killing it. There was always a loser that would try it and he would forever be forsaken by the Hackers.
Read Hackers by Steven Levy. I read that book every year almost.
Well in the end the frequency of someone pressing the red button went down as the challenge was pretty much eliminated. You're looking at it as if the glass was half empty. It's not perfect but it allowed them maximum freedom to play with small downsides of troublemakers.
This obviously wouldn't work today but back then the culture of the users was very different.
That world did exist. In the 1980s my password to the campus timeshare unix system was ]]. The system required at least two characters, and these were the closest to the return key.
Many people's passwords were known. I trusted nobody to rm everything, and nobody ever did.
I'm the mid-90s I worked at a UK university computer science department. At the time there were no firewalls around the departmental network and pretty much every machine, from the Sun and SGI workstations through to the multi-CPU servers, were directly connected to the Internet. We used NFS, rlogin and co. to transfer files and connect to different machines. I can remember logging into machines remotely from home using a modem, an ISP and passwords-in-the-clear. There was no regime I was aware of to apply software patches to machines.
Looking back, I can't believe how much of a trusting place the internet was back then.
If the computer isn't connected to the internet and doesn't have private information on them then it doesn't seem to matter if there is a password or not.
Don't forget these machines were in a much safer environment than todays.
Multi-user computers are far less important now than they used to be. With systems that compose clouds, you might want the linux kernel and IPC but you don't care about unix permissions models.
I'd like to work on a totally open system where users could clone one another's blocks of memory and see everything. You could come up with a more collaborative environment than we have in unix atm. However, I wouldn't want an arrangement where one person's slip of the fingers could destroy the environment.
