[TUHS] Ken visits Cray Research Inc and finds old bug

[ken@google.com (Ken Thompson)]

this is bogus.

there are 2 real stories that might be
early cousins to this:

1. i visited eta (they were trying to make
a supercomputer - eta10 - that was supposed to
escape all the problems of software by porting
unix. i tested it and found a dozen bugs.

2. dmr and i visited nsa for some unrelated business
(see dmr, reed, morris paper on the enigma). mumahgh
was bragging about the super secure unix that ran
on a lot og their machines. he invited us to play and
gave us a console. dennis distracted him and i went
to the console and quickly became su. i never told
him how it was done, and now i dont really remember.


On Sun, Nov 12, 2017 at 2:57 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> On Sun, 12 Nov 2017, ron minnich wrote:
>
>> There's a story I heard once in supercomputing circles from the 80s, that
>> Ken visited CRI in Minneapolis, sat down at the console of a machine running
>> the then-new port of Unix to one of the Crays, typed a command, and said
>> something like "ah, that bug is still there." Anybody know what the bug was?
>
>
> I remember the story too; I think it was one of the text tools (grep, sed, I
> dunno), but yeah, a reference would be nice (at least for the archives).
>
> --
> Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will
> suffer."