[AStonesThrow]

  [e-mail]

It was actually the A.I. Lab at M.I.T. and they already had their own dedicated subdomain for it. This had to have been around 1990-91. And IIRC, the actual admins made a valiant effort to keep all the shell users away from "root" privileges, so it wasn't a total dumpster fire and the system stayed alive, mostly

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Computer_Science_and_Artif...

[tptacek]

I mean, I remember, in 1994, being on those systems. But it meant nothing. Anybody could be. There wasn't even a glimmer of interestingness about it. It was like "ls"'ing around an anonymous FTP server.

[AStonesThrow]

Hey, I cannot even begin to describe the thrill I got when I first found my way to the AF.MIL anon-ftp server! It was probably sparsely populated with public domain software and a couple boring games, but it felt like I'd just walked in the front gate of Miramar and witnessed the Blue Angels doing barrel rolls.

Sure, it was basically "a poster on the wall" for the US Air Force, and the US Army guy on Usenet shared nothing about his actual Ballistics Research Labs experiments, but for a college freshman kid, I'd never been on a way k00ler bboard, doodz!!1

[anthk]

ITS had no root