This piece really made me think about how deeply historical tech influences our current systems, it's fascinating to trace the lineage from those big mainframes to today's distributed networks. It's wild to consider that initial fork in technology, where one path led to user empowerment and the other to centralized control, and how even now with AI, we're constantly navigating those tension between centralization and distributed power.
Jeebus this brings back some memories. I worked on Datapoint computers for 9 years, and that included their Token Ring network (ARCnet? don't remember) starting around 1980. They wouldn't provide us with the documentation we wanted, so my boss told me to just start exploring, write a game, anything, just poke at it and see what you can document.
It was dynamite fun. At some point I had documented all their system calls well enough that my boss went to them (Austiin? San Antonio? Wherever the Alamo is) and said, basically, you give us the real deal under NDA or we release this unofficial documentation to the public. He came back with the real deal.
Along the way I was poking at their Token Ring authentication for logging into terminals and found a flaw which was dumb as rocks. When you typed in the password on your terminal (which were real computers with local disc drives, not dumb tubes), it sent the username out as a broadcast asking if anyone had auth data for this user. If any node waved its hand and said "Me! I've got that user!" it would send the password, in the clear, to that node!
So I wrote a Stupid Little Test Program™ which sat in a loop looking for those username query packets, always answered "Me! I've got that user!", got the password and dumped it to the screen, and sent back the disappointing auth reply that sorry, no, I don't have auth data for that user, my bad.
I vaguely remember Datapoint fixing it lickety split quick, but that was a long time ago.
This piece really made me think about how deeply historical tech influences our current systems, it's fascinating to trace the lineage from those big mainframes to today's distributed networks. It's wild to consider that initial fork in technology, where one path led to user empowerment and the other to centralized control, and how even now with AI, we're constantly navigating those tension between centralization and distributed power.
Jeebus this brings back some memories. I worked on Datapoint computers for 9 years, and that included their Token Ring network (ARCnet? don't remember) starting around 1980. They wouldn't provide us with the documentation we wanted, so my boss told me to just start exploring, write a game, anything, just poke at it and see what you can document.
It was dynamite fun. At some point I had documented all their system calls well enough that my boss went to them (Austiin? San Antonio? Wherever the Alamo is) and said, basically, you give us the real deal under NDA or we release this unofficial documentation to the public. He came back with the real deal.
Along the way I was poking at their Token Ring authentication for logging into terminals and found a flaw which was dumb as rocks. When you typed in the password on your terminal (which were real computers with local disc drives, not dumb tubes), it sent the username out as a broadcast asking if anyone had auth data for this user. If any node waved its hand and said "Me! I've got that user!" it would send the password, in the clear, to that node!
So I wrote a Stupid Little Test Program™ which sat in a loop looking for those username query packets, always answered "Me! I've got that user!", got the password and dumped it to the screen, and sent back the disappointing auth reply that sorry, no, I don't have auth data for that user, my bad.
I vaguely remember Datapoint fixing it lickety split quick, but that was a long time ago.