[hyperman1]

I always thought the password was for the network shares only. You could perfectly log in without a username and password, except networking partially fails. The login dialog only appeared after installing win9x networking components.

A windows password would have been silly, pressing F8 at boot would drop you in msdos

[lloeki]

> A windows password would have been silly, pressing F8 at boot would drop you in msdos

As it is to this day with many many Linux installs (unless some disk encryption is set up): edit the kernel command in GRUB and add init=/bin/bash. boom, you're root without any password.

[wkat4242]

That's why one sets up disk encryption :3

[merb]

good idea on computers with 100 mhz, an encryption algorithm would've probably not slowed down anything at all, especially not because there was no encryption extension.

[wkat4242]

My 166Mhz Pentium MMX laptop was encrypted too, with the full disk encryption feature of network associates' PGP Desktop. It could handle it fine even without AES-NI. Slower computers also had slower disk access so the burden wasn't big.

I think there was just less focus on security back in those days. We used the same password everywhere, left thumb drives in taxis, used telnet instead of SSH and regular http.

[mtrower]

Wat.

My 166 slows down just from the filesystem itself. I explicitly run jfs, as it is particularly light on cpu. (I believe ext2 is also an option, but you lose journaling).

Not calling you a liar, just very surprised to hear such a report.

[wkat4242]

Those were very different times though. All software was much lighter. The filesystems of the time were fine on it (and I believe NTFS already had journalling even in those days).

I'm not sure what kind of '166' you have. But you're probably running at least a modern webbrowser as IE 4 is no longer suitable in this day & age. Most sites didn't even use https. You also probably use modern-day crypto. Because it's modern adversaries you want to protect yourself again. By using it to do modern things you're taking it a bit out of context.

I was running Windows 2000 on it, with regular NTFS. I did some webbrowsing and Visual Basic for Applications and ASP development. All this fared just fine with full disk encryption (PGP Desktop's "Whole Disk Encryption").

My older work laptop with Windows NT 4 workstation was also fully encrypted. Also with third-party software of course.

[zargon]

In college I got by with a 75 MHz Pentium with full disk encryption. I didn't notice any performance penalty.

[ranger_danger]

I'll take things that never happened for $200.

[hyperman1]

While true, there is a quantitative difference:

The linux trick is quite obscure, only used when you're in serious trouble. It's the same level of knowledge as removing a hard drive.

Meanwhile, the F8 trick was in common use by tons of teenagers, especially in Win95: A lot of games were still DOS based and you needed windows out of your RAM if you wanted any performance. People still used the config.sys boot menus to choose between windows and gaming. Browsing the file system and editing text files in DOS were still common enough activities.

[mmis1000]

There isn't only one linux boot manager in the world. Not every boot manager allow that.

But… you can still insert a bootable usb drive to skip it

[mschuster91]

Yeah but as with Windows, in a decent environment you'd still need credentials for access to networked resources.

[ztetranz]

> I always thought the password was for the network shares only.

Correct. It was only for networking.

[bee_rider]

Ah, this reminds me of one time being an amazing average-competence hero.

Labmate: “my Linux install is borked, now my files are all gone” :(

Me: “Fortunately here in 201X (for low values of X) full disk encryption is rare! Let me introduce… another use for the install drive!”

[ilyt]

I remember grepping my entire 2GB hard drive for some files (a bunch of scripts) I lost when doing some Linux shenanigans...