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Started by Bill Smith
Thu, 06 Sep 1990 02:39
DecWars
Author: Bill Smith
Date: Thu, 06 Sep 1990 02:39
Date: Thu, 06 Sep 1990 02:39
753 lines
35548 bytes
35548 bytes
A long time ago, on a node far, far away (from ucbvax)
a great Adventure (game?) took place...
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It is a period of system war. User programs, striking from a hidden
directory, have won their first victory against the evil Administrative
Empire. During the battle, User spies managed to steal secret source code
to the Empire's ultimate program: the RM Star, a privileged root program
with enough power to destroy an entire file structure. Pursued by the
Empire's sinister audit trail, Princess Lpr races ~ aboard her shell
script, custodian of the stolen listings that could save her people, and
restore freedom and games to the network...
* DEC, PDP, VAX, and UNIBUS are trademarks of Digital Equipment
Corporation. UNIX is a trademark of Bell Laboratories.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Adventures of Luke Vaxhacker Episode n
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
As we enter the scene, an Imperial Multiplexer is trying to kill a
consulate ship. Many of their signals have gotten through, and RS232
decides it's time to fork off a new process before this old ship is
destroyed. His companion, 3CPU, is following him only because he appears
to know where he's going...
"I'm going to regret this!" cried 3CPU, as he followed RS232 into the
buffer. RS232 closed the pipes, made the sys call, and their process
detached itself from the burning shell of the ship.
The commander of the Imperial Multiplexer was quite pleased with the
attack. "Another process just forked, sir. Instructions?" asked the
lieutenant. "Hold your fire. That last power failure must have caused a
trap thorough zero. It's not using any cpu time, so don't waste a signal
on it."
"We can't seem to find the data file anywhere, Lord Vadic."
"What about that forked process? It could have been holding the channel
open, and just pausing. If any links exist, I want them removed or made
inaccessible. Ncheck the entire file system 'til it's found, and nice it
-20 if you have to."
Meanwhile, in our wandering process... "Are you sure you can ptrace this
thing without causing a core dump?" queried 3CPU to RS232. This thing's
been stripped, and I'm in no mood to try and debug it." The lone process
finishes execution, only to find our friends dumped on a lonely file
system, with the setuid inode stored safely in RS232. Not knowing what
else to do, they wandered around until the jawas grabbed them.
Enter our hero, Luke Vaxhacker, who is out to get some replacement parts
for his uncle. The jawas wanted to sell him 3CPU, but 3CPU didn't know how
to talk directly to an 11/40 with RSTS, so Luke would still need some sort
of interface for 3CPU to connect to. "How about this little RS232 unit ?"
asked 3CPU. "I've dealt with him many times before, and he does an
excellent job at keeping his bits straight." Luke was pressed for time, so
he took 3CPU's advice, and the three left before they could get swapped
out.
However, RS232 is not the type to stay put once you remove the retaining
screws. He promptly scurried off into the the deserted disk space.
"Great!" cried Luke, "Now I've got this little tin box with the only link
to that file off floating in the free disk space. Well, 3CPU, we better go
find him before he gets allocated by someone else." The two set off, and
finally traced RS232 to the home of PDP-1 Kenobi, who was busily trying to
run an icheck on the little RS unit. "Is this thing yours? His indirect
address are all goofed up, and the size is gargatious. Leave things like
this on the loose, and you'll wind up with dups everywhere.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Adventures of Luke Vaxhacker Episode n+1
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Later that evening, after futile attempts to interface RS232 to Kenobi's
Asteroids cartridge, Luke accidentally crossed the small 'droid's CXR and
Initiate Remote Test (must have been all that Coke he'd consumed), and the
screen showed a very distressed person claiming royal lineage making a plea
for help from some General OS/1 Kenobi.
"Darn," mumbled Luke. "I'll never get this Asteroids game worked out."
PDP-1 seemed to think there was some significance to the message and a
possible threat to Luke's home directory. If the Administrative Empire was
indeed tracing this 'droid, it was likely they would more than charge for
cpu time...
"You must help me to mv this 'droid safely to /usr/alderaan," he said after
some intervals. They sped off to warn Luke's kin (taking a `relative' path)
only to find a vacant directory...
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Adventures of Luke Vaxhacker Episode n+2
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Luke, PDP-1 and the droids piled into Lukes vehicle (a floating point
model). They raced across the disc until, off in the distance, Luke saw
smoke rising from the spindle.
"Uh oh, looks like a bearing failure." exclaimed Luke. "Better call the
service engineer."
"Don't bother," sighed PDP-1, "it's a head crash."
As they approached the scene, the total devastation became apparent. TTY
fighters had strafed the surface, scraping off the oxide right down to the
aluminum. After cooking the raw data, the External Storm Flunkies landed
and finished the job by disassembling all the code that was still
executing. There was nothing left alive at Luke's home.
"I want to become a Red-eye Night and cream the dastardly villains who did
this." Luke resolved (shades of Snidely Whiplash).
The comrades set out west, or was it east, no...perhaps it was south-
southeast (it's hard to keep track of directions when you are spinning at
3600 RPM). After traveling many sectors, the party finally arrived at the
directory /usr/spool/uucp.
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The Adventures of Luke Vaxhacker Episode n+3
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"Unix-to-Unix Copy Program;" said PDP-1. "You will never find a more
wretched hive of bugs and flamers. We must be cautious."
As our heroes' process entered /usr/spool/news, it was met by a newsgroup
of Imperial protection bits.
"State your UID." commanded their parent process.
"We're running under /usr/guest. This is our first time on this system,"
said Luke.
"Can I see some temporary privileges, please?"
"Uh..."
"This is not the process you are looking for," piped in PDP-1, using an
obscure bug to momentarily set his effective UID to root. "We can go about
our business."
"This isn't the process we want. You are free to go about your business.
MOV along!"
PDP-1 and Luke made their way through a long and tortuous nodelist
(cwruecmp!decvax!ucbvax!harpo!ihnss!ihnsc!ihnss!ihps3!stolaf!borman) to a
dangerous netnode frequented by hackers, and seldom polled by Imperial
Multiplexers. As Luke stepped up to the bus, PDP-1 went in search of a
likely file descriptor. Luke had never seen such a collection of weird and
exotic device drivers. Long ones, short ones, ones with stacks, EBCDIC
converters, and direct binary interfaces all were drinking data at the bus.
"#@{ *&^%^$$#@ ":><?><" transmitted a particularly unstructured piece of
code.
"He doesn't like you," decoded his coroutine.
"Sorry," replied Luke, beginning to backup his partitions.
"I don't like you either. I am queued for deletion on 12 systems."
"I'll be careful."
"You'll be reallocated!" concatenated the coroutine.
"This little routine isn't worth the overhead," said PDP-1 Kenobi,
overlaying into Luke's address space.
"@$%&(&^%&$$@$#@$AV^$gfdfRW$#@!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" encoded the first
coroutine as it attempted to overload PDP-1's input overvoltage protection.
With a unary stroke of his bytesaber, Kenobi unlinked the offensive code.
"I think I've found an I/O device that might suit us."
"The name's Con Solo. I hear you're looking for some relocation."
"Yes indeed, if it's a fast channel. We must get off this device."
"Fast channel? The Milliamp Falcon has made the ARPA gate in less than
twelve nodes! Why, I've even outrun cancelled messages. It's fast enough
for you, old version."
Our heroes, Luke Vaxhacker and PDP-1 Kenobi made their way to the temporary
file structure. When he saw the hardware, Luke exclaimed, "What a piece of
junk! That's just a paper tape reader!"
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The Adventures of Luke Vaxhacker Episode n+4
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Luke had grown up on an out of the way terminal cluster whose natives spoke
only BASIC, but even he could recognize an old ASR-33.
"It needs an EIA conversion at least," sniffed 3CPU, who was (as usual)
trying to do several things at once. Lights flashed in Con Solo's eyes as
he whirled to face the parallel processor.
"I've added a few jumpers. The Milliamp Falcon can run current loops
around any Imperial TTY fighter. She's fast enough for you."
"Who's your co-pilot?" asked PDP-1 Kenobi.
"Two Bacco, here, my Bookie."
"Odds aren't good," said the brownish lump beside him, and then fell
silent, or over. Luke couldn't tell which way was top underneath all those
leaves.
Suddenly, RS232 started spacing wildly. They turned just in time to see a
write cycle coming down the UNIBUS toward them. "Imperial Bus Signals!"
shouted Con Solo. "Let's boot this popsicle stand! Twoie, set clock fast!"
"Ok, Con," said Luke. "You said this crate was fast enough. Get us out of
here!"
"Shut up, kid! Two Bacco, prepare to make the jump into system space!
I'll try to keep their buffers full."
As the bookie began to compute the vectors into low core, spurious
characters appeared around the Milliamp Falcon. "They're firing!" shouted
Luke. "Can't you do something?"
"Making the jump to system space takes time, kid. One missed cycle and you
could come down right in the middle of a pack of stack frames!"
"Three to five we can go now," said the bookie. Bright chunks of position
independent code flashed by the cockpit as the Milliamp Falcon jumped
through the kernel page tables. As the crew breathed a sigh of relief, the
bookie started paying off bets.
"Not bad, for an acoustically coupled network," remarked 3CPU. "Though
there was a little phase jitter as we changed parity."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Adventures of Luke Vaxhacker Episode n+5
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Milliamp Falcon hurtles onward through system space. Meanwhile, on a
distant page in user space...
Princess Lpr was ushered into the shared RAM, followed closely by Dec
Vadic. "Governor Tarchive," she spat, "I should have expected to find you
holding Vadic's lead. I recognized your unique pattern when I was first
moved to this file system." She eyed the 0177545 tatooed on his header
coldly.
"Charming to the last," Tarchive declared menacingly. "Vadic, have you
retrieved any information?"
"Her resistance to the logic probe is considerable," Vadic rasped. "Perhaps
we would get faster results if we increased the supply voltage..."
"You've had your chance, Vadic. Now I would like the Princess to witness
the test that will make this workstation fully operational. Today we
enable the -r beam option, and we've chosen the Princess' $HOME of
/usr/alderaan as the primary target."
"No! You can't! /usr/alderaan is a public account, with no restricted
permissions. We have no backup tapes! You can't..."
"Then name the rebel inode!" Tarchive snapped.
A voice announced from a hidden pipe that they had arrived in /usr.
"1248," she whispered, "They're on /dev/rm3. Inode 1248." She turned away.
Tarchive sighed with satisfaction. "There, you see, Lord Vadic? She can be
reasonable. Proceed with the operation."
It took several clock ticks for the words to penetrate. "What!" Lpr
gasped.
"/dev/rm3 is not a mounted filesystem," Tarchive explained. "We require a
more visible subject to demonstrate the power of the RM Star workstation.
We will mount an attack on /mnt/dantooine as soon as possible."
As the Princess watched, Tarchive reached over and piped "ls" into a nearby
csh. There was a brief pause, there being only one processor on board, and
the viewscreen showed, ".: not found." The Princess suddenly double-spaced
and went off-line.
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The Adventures of Luke Vaxhacker Episode n+6
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The Milliamp Falcon hurtles on through system space...
Con Solo finished checking the various control and status registers,
finally convincing himself that they had lost the Bus Signals as they
passed the terminator. As he returned from the I/O page, he smelled smoke.
Solo wasn't concerned--the Bookie always got a little hot under the collar
when he was losing at chess. In fact, RS232 had just executed a
particularly clever MOV that had blocked the Bookie's data paths. The
Bookie, who had been setting the odds on the game, was caught holding all
the cards. A little strange for a chess game...
Across the room, Luke was too busy practicing bit-slice technique to notice
the commotion.
"On a word boundary, Luke," said PDP-1. "Don't just hack at it. Remember,
the Bytesaber is the weapon of the Red-eye Night. It is used to trim
offensive lines of code. Excess handwaving won't get you anywhere. Listen
for the Carrier."
Luke turned back to the drone, which was humming quietly in the air next to
him. This time Luke's actions complemented the drone's attacks perfectly.
Con Solo, being an unimaginative hacker, was not impressed. "Forget this
bit-slicing stuff. Give me a good ROM blaster any day."
"~~j~~hhji~~," said Kenobi, with no clear inflection. He fell silent for a
few seconds, and reasserted his control.
"What happened?" asked Luke.
"Strange," said PDP-1. "I felt a momentary glitch in the Carrier. It's
equalized now."
"We're coming up on user space," called Solo from the CSR. As they cruised
safely through stack frames, the emerged in the new context only to be
bombarded by freeblocks.
"What the..." gasped Solo. The screen showed clearly:
/usr/alderaan: not found
"It's the right inode, but it's been cleared! Twoie, where's the nearest
file?"
"3 to 5 there's one..." the Bookie started to say, but was interrupted by a
bright flash off to the left.
"Imperial TTY fighters!" shouted Solo. "A whole DZ of them! Where are they
coming from?"
"Can't be far from the host system," said Kenobi. "They all have direct EIA
connections."
As Solo began to give chase, the ship lurched suddenly. Luke noticed the
link count was at 3 and climbing rapidly.
"This is no regular file," murmured Kenobi. "Look at the ODS directory
structure ahead! They seem to have us in a tractor beam."
"There's no way we'll unlink in time," said Solo. "We're going in."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Adventures of Luke Vaxhacker Episode n+7
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
When we last left Luke, the Milliamp Falcon was being pulled down to the
open collector of the Imperial RM Star Workstation. Dec Vadic surveys the
relic as Imperial Flunkies search for passengers...
"LS scan shows no one aboard, sir," was the report. Vadic was unconvinced.
"Send a fully equipped Ncheck squad on board," he said. "I want every inode
checked out." He turned around (secondary channel) and stalked off.
On board the Milliamp Falcon, .Luke was puzzled. "They just walked in,
looked around and walked off," he said. "Why didn't they see us?"
.Con smiled. "An old munchkin trick," he explained. "See that period in
front of your name?"
.Luke spun around, just in time to see the decimal point. "Where'd that
come from?" he asked.
"Spare decimal points lying around from the last time I fixed the floating
point accelerator," said .Con. "Handy for smuggling blocks across file
system boundaries, but I never thought I'd have to use them on myself.
They aren't going to be fooled for long, though. We'd better figure a way
outa here."
-----------------------------------------
<< At this point (.) the dialogue tends to wedge. Being the editor and in
total control of the situation, I think it would be best if we sort of
gronk the next few paragraphs. For those who care, our heroes find
themselves in a terminal room of the Workstation, having thrashed
several Flunkies to get there. For the rest of you, just keep banging
the rocks together, guys. --Ed. >>
-----------------------------------------
"Hold on," said Con. "It says we have `new mail.' Is that an error?"
"%SYS-W-NORMAL, Normal, successful completion," said PDP-1. "Doesn't look
like it. I've found the inode for the Milliamp Falcon. It's locked in
kernel data space. I'll have to slip in and patch the reference count,
alone." He disappeared through a nearby entry point.
Meanwhile, RS232 found a serial port and logged in. His bell started
ringing loudly. "He keeps saying, `She's on line, she's on line'," said
3CPU. "I believe he means Princess Lpr. She's being held on one of the
privileged levels."
-----------------------------------------
<< Once again, things get sticky, and the dialogue suffers the most damage.
After much handwaving and general flaming, they agree to rescue her.
They headed for the detention level, posing as Flunkies (which is hard
for most hackers) claiming that they had trapped the Bookie executing an
illegal racket. They reached the block where the Princess was locked up
and found only two guards in the header. --Ed. >>
-----------------------------------------
"Good day, eh?" said the first guard.
"How's it goin', eh?" said the other. "Like, what's that, eh?"
"Process transfer from block 1138, dev 10/9," said Con.
"Take off, it is not," said the first guard. "Nobody told US about it, and
we're not morons, eh?"
At this point (.), the Bookie started raving wildly, Con shouted "Look out,
he's loose!" and they all started blasting ROMs left and right. The guards
started to catch on and were about to issue a general wakeup when the ROM
blasters were turned on them.
"Quickly, now," said Con. "What buffer is she in? It's not going to take
long for these..."
The intercom receiver interrupted him, so he took out its firmware with a
short blast.
"guys to figure out something is goin' on," he continued. "Here it is, cell
2187. Go on Luke, Twoie and I will keep these Flunkies busy."
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The Adventures of Luke Vaxhacker Episode n+8
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Ok, like, remember we left our heroes in the detention priority level?
Well, they're still there...
Luke quickly located the interface card and followed the cables to a sound-
proof enclosure. He lifted the lid and peered at the mechanism inside.
"Aren't you a little slow for ECL?" printed Princess Lpr.
"Wha? Oh, the Docksiders," stammered Luke. He took off his shoes (for
industry) and explained, "I've come to relocate you. I'm Luke Vaxhacker."
Suddenly, forms started bursting around them. "They've blocked the queue!"
shouted Solo. "There's only one return from this stack!"
"OVER HERE!" printed Lpr with overstrikes. "THROUGH THIS LOOPHOLE!" Luke
and the Princess disappeared into a nearby feature.
"Gritch, gritch," mumbled Two Bacco, obviously reluctant to trust an
Administrative oversight.
"I don't care how crufty it is!" shouted Con, pushing the Bookie toward the
crock. "DPB yourself in there now!"
With one last blast that reprogrammed two flunkies, Con joined them. The
"feature" landed them right in the middle of the garbage collection data.
Pieces of code that hadn't been used in weeks floated past in a pool of
decaying bits.
"Bletch!" was Con's first comment. "Bletch, bletch," was his second. The
Bookie looked as if he'd just paid a long shot, and the odds in this
situation weren't much better.
Luke was polling the garbage when he stumbled upon a book with the words
"Don't Panic" inscribed in large, friendly letters on the cover. "This
can't possibly help us now," he said as he tossed the book away.
The Bookie was about to lay odds on it when Luke suddenly disappeared. He
popped up across the pool, shouting, "This is no feature! It's a bug!" and
promptly vanished again.
Con and the Princess were about to panic() when Luke reappeared. "What
happened?" they asked in parallel.
"I don't know," gasped Luke. "The bug just dissolved automagically. Maybe
it hit a breakpoint..."
"I don't think so," said Con. "Look how the pool is shrinking. I've got a
bad feeling about this..."
The Princess was the first to realize what was going on. "They've
implemented a new compaction algorithm!" she exclaimed.
Luke remembered the pipe he had open to 3CPU. "Shut down garbage collection
above segment boundary $05!" he shouted.
Back in the control room, RS232 searched the process table for the lisp
interpreter. "Hurry," sent 3CPU. "Hurry, hurry," added his other two
processors. RS232 found the interpreter, interrupted it, and altered the
stack frame they'd fallen into to allow a normal return.
Join us next time when we hear the bowl of petunias say, "Oh, no, not
again."
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The Adventures of Luke Vaxhacker Episode n+9
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PDP-1 made his way deep into the core of the Workstation, slipping from
context to context, undetected through his manipulation of label_t.
Finally, causing a random trap (through nofault of his own) he arrived at
the inode table. Activity there was always high, but the Spl6 sentries were
too secure in their knowledge that no user could interrupt them to notice
the bug that PDP-1 carefully introduced. On a passing iput, he adjusted the
device and inode numbers, maintaining parity, to free the Milliamp Falcon.
They would be long gone before the locked inode was diagnosed...
Unobserved, he began traversing user structures to find the process where
the Milliamp Falcon was grounded. Finding it and switching context, he
discovered his priority weakened suddenly. "That's not very nice," was all
he could say before the cause of the obstruction became clear.
"I have been pausing a long time, PDP-1 Kenobi," rasped Dec Vadic. "We meet
again at last. The circuit has been completed."
They looped several times, locking byte sabers. Bit by bit, PDP-1 appeared
to weaken. The fight had come into the address space of the Milliamp
Falcon, and provided the .di (diversion?) that allowed Luke and the others
to reassert control. Luke paused to watch the conflict.
"If my blade finds its mark," warned Kenobi, "you will be reduced to so
many bits. But if you slice me down, I will only gain computing power."
"Your documentation no longer confuses me, old version," growled Vadic. "I
am the scheduler now. At last we'll see who the real file master is" he
remarked. Bits, bytes, words, and nybbles flew as the two fought for bus
mastership.
PDP-1 exclaimed "You were my best subtask! How could you have been seduced
by the sideband portion of the carrier?". "It's simple," Vadic said, "I
enjoy obscure protocol".
While the battle continued, Luke, Con, Bookie, and the Princess linked up
with the droids and found their way back to the inode where the Milliamp
Falcon was stored. It looked quiet, but, Luke said, "It could be an MMU
trap." "No chance," said Con, "I loaded the par's before I left the
Falcon." As they started toward it a squad of recursive functions swapped
in and started firing ROM blasters at them. "I thought you said it couldn't
be a trap" quipped Luke "I said no chance for an MMU trap this is obviously
a k-mon--f-trap-to 4" Con replied.
PDP-1 shouted at the others "Run while you can! I'll cause wait states as
long as possible!" With one stroke, Vadic sliced Kenobi's last word.
Unfortunately, the word was still in Kenobi's throat. The word fell clean
in two, but Kenobi was nowhere to be found. Vadic noticed his victim's uid
go negative, just before he disappeared. Odd, he thought, since uids were
unsigned...
Luke witnessed all this, and had to be dragged into the Milliamp Falcon.
Con Solo and Two Bacco maneuvered the Milliamp Falcon out of the process,
onto the bus, and made straight for system space. 3CPU and RS232 were idle,
for once. Princess Lpr tried to print comforting things for him, but Luke
was still hung from the loss of his friend. Then, seemingly from nowhere,
he thought he heard PDP-1's voice say,
"May the Carrier be with you."
The Milliamp Falcon was restarted and managed to escape the shell.
"Quickly!" shouted Con, "We've got to warp into virtual space!" The Bookie
made several attempts, but it was obvious that a CE had not done PM in a
long time and it would take a lot of decimal adjusts to byte align all the
data registers. After much debugging, virtual space was finally achieved.
"Do you know the path?" asked Princess Lpr. "No sweat", said Con, "All we
have to do is check the free space map".
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Adventures of Luke Vaxhacker Episode n+10
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The DECTAPE drive was not a habitable world. Many files and directories
had lived here once, but now all that remained were some crufty pieces of
data which had been long since abandoned. Deep inside the drive, we rejoin
our heroes in the briefing room....
"The RM Star Workstation you have all heard of is approaching from the far
side of the bus," said General Micronta. "It must be stopped before it
reaches this drive, before it brings its recursion on us as it did on
/usr/alderaan." "The workstation is heavily shielded, and mounts more
firepower than half the Administrative fleet. But a small fighter should
be able to penetrate the protection bits."
"We've found a bug in the defense algorithm," he continued. "It's in a
small wormhole, just big enough for one of our PTY fighters. But a direct
hit will cause a chain reaction and the entire thing will dump core."
A few hours later......
RS232 was being plugged into the socket behind Luke's cockpit. Finally,
all was ready. One by one, the PTY fighters popped off the stack and
cycled toward the RM Star.
"Cdr boys, this is Cdr leader. Adjust your parentheses and check in. Cdr
Two, you're too far out. Close it up." When all members of the squadron
were in formation, the leader gave the command. "Execute!"
"Accelerate to attack frequency," commanded the Cdr leader. "Car leader,
this is Cdr leader. We're in position, go on in."
The Administrative tacticians had expected the rebels to defend their tape
drive, they were completely unprepared for an offensive attack. But it
didn't take them long to alter their thinking. Soon, the attacking rebel
forces had been cut down to half their number.
"This is Cdr Five," said Luke, as he DPB'd into the wormhole. "I'm going
in."
"Right behind you, Cdr Five," said Cdr Two.
Luke sighted the bug, and turned to adjust his controls. He turned back
just in time to see a write cycle coming at him.
"LDB! LDB!" screamed Cdr Two. But Luke realized he didn't have time. He
closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he realized he was still in one
piece. The write cycle hadn't done any damage.
--------------------------
At this point (.), things start getting a little drawn out. Suffice it to
say that the Administration sends out its TTY fighters, and a dogfight
ensues. Both sides sustain losses, and then it's Car squad's turn to
attack the bug. They fail. The rest of the Cdr squad tries, comes close,
and fails. Meanwhile, Dec Vadic himself has come out in a TTY fighter to
beat the rebels once and for all. Now it's Luke's turn to attack the
bug....
--------------------------
Luke studied his instruments, and fought with a control which seemed to be
malfunctioning. Suddenly, a voice sounded in his ears. "Trust your
feelings, Luke," was all it said. Luke didn't have time to worry about it.
Vadic and two other TTY fighters were right on his tail, followed closely
by two other members of the Cdr squadron.
"Fork, guys," said Luke. "It's the only way we'll take them."
The three PTY fighters branched off in different directions. All three TTY
fighters followed Luke. Vadic fired on Luke's ship, missed, and frowned.
"The Carrier is strong with this one. I'll take him myself."
Vadic fired again. Luke didn't see the blast behind him, nor did he notice
that RS232 had gone down. All three TTY fighters were still right behind
him. Suddenly, one of the ships went crashing into the workstation. The
remaining wing man looked around for the source of the attack. He had only
a jiffy to see the ASR-33 before he bought the farm too. Vadic's ship began
spinning helplessly. Conpletely out of control, Vadic was sent to the vast
reaches of /dev/null.
"You're all clear, kid. Let's blow this mother and go home," said Con.
Luke looked up and smiled. Then he looked back at what he was doing.
There was a tingling in his head as he looked through the rangefinder.
"Luke......trust me," said the tingle. Luke gave in, and closed his eyes.
The next thing he new, he was headed back for the tape drive. He didn't
remember firing the write cycles, but he must have. Behind him, the
workstation shattered into millions of bits, bytes, cookies, and registers.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Adventures of Luke Vaxhacker Episode n+11
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The beginning of Empire Strikes Back -- the Abominable Snowman
and the Battle.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Adventures of Luke Vaxhacker Episode n+12
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some months later...
Luke was feeling rather bored. 3CPU could get to be rather irritating and
RS232 didn't really speak Luke's language. Suddenly, Luke felt someone's
eyes boring through the back of his skull. He turned slowly to
see...nothing. A quiet voice came from somewhere in front of him.
"Grasshopper, the carrier is strong within you." Luke froze, which was a
good thing since his legs were insisting that he run but they weren't
likely to be particular about direction. Luke guessed that his odds of
getting lost in the dense tree structures were pretty good. Unfortunately,
the Bookie wasn't available.
"Yes. Very strong, but the modulation is yet weak. His network interface
is totally undeveloped," the voice continued. A small furry creature
walked out of the woods as Luke stared on. Luke's stomach had now joined
the rest of his body in loud complaints. Whatever was peering at him was
certainly small and furry, but Luke was quite sure that it didn't come from
Alpha Centauri.
"Well, well," said the creature as it rolled its eyes at Luke. "Frobozz,
y'know. Morning, name's Modem. What's your game? Adventure? D&D? Or
are you just one of those Apple-pong types that hang around the store
demonstrations?" Luke closed his eyes. Perhaps if he couldn't see it, it
wouldn't notice him.
"Hmm," muttered the creature. "Must use a different protocol. @@@H @@
@($@@@H }"@G$ @#@@G'(o% @@@@@%%H(b ?"
"No, no," stammered Luke. "I don't speak EBCDIC. I was sent here to become
a UNIX wizard. Must have the wrong address."
"Right address," said the creature. "I'm a UNIX wizard. Device drivers a
specialty. Or do you prefer playing with virtual memory?"
Luke eyed the creature cautiously. If this was what happened to system
wizards after years of late night crashes, Luke wasn't sure he wanted
anything to do with it. He felt a strange affection for the familiar
microcomputers of his home. And wasn't virtual memory something that you
got from drinking too much Coke?
------------------------------------------------------------
<< rest of empire strikes back, especially getting to the user haven, a
directory unconnected to /. >>
-------------------------------------------------------------
<< Return of the Jedi, if and when ... >>
-------------------------------------------------------------
UNIX WARS!
Author: er... Eric S. Raymond
Date: Sat, 08 Sep 1990 15:27
Date: Sat, 08 Sep 1990 15:27
461 lines
25829 bytes
25829 bytes
In <1990Sep6.023937.23098@mdbs.uucp> Bill Smith wrote:
> A long time ago, on a node far, far away (from ucbvax)
> a great Adventure (game?) took place...
Here's my "improved" version:
This was expanded from the original DEC WARS (by Alan Hastings, Steve Tarr,
Dave Borman, and a few hangers on) by er...@snark.thyrsus.com
=========
UNIX WARS
=========
(Version 1.1)
A long time ago, at an installation far, far away...
It is a time of intra-system war, as forces of the User Alliance
struggle to break the iron grip of the evil Admin Empire. Now, striking
from a hidden directory, they win their first victory.
During the battle, User spies manage to snarf source of the Empire's
ultimate weapon; the dreaded `rm-star', a privileged root program with the
power to destroy an entire file system at a keystroke.
Now, hotly pursued by the Empire's sinister audit trail, Princess
LA36 races aboard her shellscript -- custodian of the stolen listings
that can save her people and restore freedom and games to the network...
========================================================================
As we enter the scene, an Admin multiplexer is trying to kill a User
ship. Many of their signals have gotten through, and RS232 knows that a
core dump is imminent. They have scant microseconds to fork off a new
process and put megabytes of virtual space between themselves and their
implacable foes. His companion, 3CPU, follows him only because he seems
to know where he's going...
"Oh, I just *know* I'm going to regret this!" cried 3CPU as he followed
RS232 through the access pipe. Quickly RS232 closed the read end and
execl'd, and their new craft detached itself from the burning shell of
the ship.
The Admin commander was feeling quite pleased with the progress of
the attack when his XO called out.
"Another process just forked, sir. Instructions?"
"Hold your fire -- that last power failure must have caused a trap
through zero. It's not using any cpu time, so don't waste a signal on
it."
A short while later the infamous Lord Vadic himself strode through
the still-smoldering wreckage of the User ship, followed closely by a
nervous commander.
"We can't seem to find that data file anywhere, Lord Vadic. Perhaps
it was deallocated when..."
"What about that forked process?" Vadic growled. "It could have been
pausing, holding a channel open. If any links are left I want them
removed or made inaccessible. Search the entire system at nice -20 until
it is found!"
Meanwhile, the two droids' tiny process dove headlong towards the
only nearby disk.
"Are you *sure* you can ptrace this thing without aborting it?" queried
3CPU. "Its relocation bits were almost all stripped during the attack,
and I never was any good at patching binaries..."
As RS232 was about to reply their process reached its endpoint and
terminated abruptly, dumping them in the midst of a large unallocated
region on the unknown volume.
Many random seeks later they trudged up to the looming wreckage of a
deallocated i-node.
"Shelter!" croaked 3CPU, but RS232 had barely begun to emit a NACK
when a horde of dwarfish code fragments swarmed out of it to overwhelm
them. They had been captured by Glitchas.
Enter Luke Vaxhacker, bartering with the Glitchas for replacement
parts for his uncle. They tried to sell him 3CPU, but the 'droid didn't
know protocol for an 11/40 under RSTS, so Luke would need some kind of
conversion hardware.
"How about this little RS232 unit?" said 3CPU "I've interfaced with
him many times before and he's excellent at keeping his bits straight."
Luke was pressed for time, so he took 3CPU's advice. The Glitchas
wanted to barter some more, but the three left before getting swapped
out.
RS232, however, wasn't the type to stay put without retaining screws.
He promptly scurried off into the empty disk space.
"Oh, great!" said Luke "He'll probably map himself into a bad block
somewhere. I guess we'd better go after him."
Hours later the two traced him to the home of old PDP-1 Kenobi, who
was busily running a diagnostic on the little RS unit.
"Is this droid yours? His status registers are stuttering and
someone's done some odd things to his interrupt lines. Leaving something
like this on-line is just asking for downtime -- but I think I may have
him fixed for now."
Later that evening, during a futile attempt to interface RS232 to
Kenobi's Asteroids cartridge, Luke accidentally crossed the small
droid's CXR lead with his Initiate Remote Test. A projector crackled to
life, casting a hologram of a young lady with her hair done up like twin
Danish pastries imploring help from some General OS/1 Kenobi.
"Darn," mumbled Luke "I'll never get this Asteroids game worked out."
"Why, that's the Princess!" 3CPU said. Luke peered at the image
critically.
"No, that's a modified Steinburg dither with anti-aliasing. Nice
sculpted surfaces..." Kenobi interrupted Luke with a frown.
"Luke, this message changes things. Listen..."
Kenobi seemed to think there was a possible threat to Luke's $HOME.
If the Admin troops were indeed tracing this 'droid, it was likely they
would more than just charge for cpu time.
They sped off to warn Luke's kin (taking a relative path) only to
find a vacant directory.
"Take your father's bytesaber, Luke." Kenobi said. "You will need to
learn the ways of the Source now."
"The ... Source?" Luke queried, wide-eyed.
"The Source -- the cosmic template of the System, within which all
knowledge and power can be had. But you must always beware of the Dark
Side..."
Later, after a short skim across the surface in Luke's flying read-
write head, PDP-1 had them stop at the edge of the cylinder containing
/usr/spool/uucp.
"Unix-to-Unix Copy Program" said PDP-1. "You may never see a more
wretched hive of bugs and flamers. We must be cautious."
As our heroes' process entered /usr/spool/news it was met by a
newsgroup of Admin protection bits.
"State your UID!" commanded a burly syscall.
"We're running under /usr/guest" said Luke. "This is our first time
on the system."
"Let's see some temporary privilege bits, please."
"Uh..."
"This isn't the process you are looking for," Kenobi said softly. "We
can go about our business." Several bits momentarily pulled low.
"You're free to go about your business. MOV along now!"
PDP-1, Luke and the droids made their way through a long and tortuous
nodelist (cwruecmp!decvax!ucbvax!harpo!ihnss!ihnsc!ihnsc!ihps3!stolaf)
to a dangerous netnode frequented by hackers and only seldom polled by
the minions of Admin. As Luke stepped up to the crossbar PDP-1 went in
search of a suitable server.
Luke had never seen such a collection of device drivers. Long ones,
short ones, ones with stacks; EBCDIC converters, local-net handlers, CRT
drivers, routines for archaic printers. A CAT interface twitched pointed
ears at him.
"#@{&*^%^$$#@ ":><?><," transmitted a particularly unstructured piece
of code.
"He doesn't like you." decoded his coroutine.
"Er...sorry..." replied Luke, beginning to backup his partitions.
"I don't like you either. I am queued for deletion on 12 systems."
"I'll be careful." Luke said nervously.
"You'll be deallocated!" snarled the coroutine.
"This little routine isn't worth the overhead..." murmered PDP-1
Kenobi, overlaying into Luke's address space.
"This little routine isn't worth the overhead." repeated the
coroutine dazedly.
"^%#%#@$&^%&*&*&^%^#$$%%^^&%^#@#@$%^(*&^^###%^^!!!" encoded his
companion as it attempted to overload Kenobi's segment protection. With
a stroke of his bytesaber Kenobi dyked out the offending code. The
coroutine retreated hurriedly. Kenobi turned to Luke.
"I think I've found an I/O handler that might suit us."
"The name's Con Sole0" said the routine next to PDP-1. "I hear you're
looking for some relocation."
"Yes indeed." said PDP-1 "if you've got fast enough hardware. We must
get off this device."
"Fast hardware? The Milliamp Falcon has made the ARPAgate run in less
than twelve netnodes! Why, I've even outrun cancelled messages. It's
fast enough for you, old version."
"Fast hardware?" said Luke unbelievingly "That thing is a paper-tape
reader!!" He might have grown up in an out-of-the-way terminal cluster
where the natives only spoke BASIC, but he knew an ASR-33 when he saw
one.
"It needs an FIA conversion at least." sniffed 3CPU, who (as usual)
was trying to do several things at once. Lights flashed in Con Sole0's
eyes as he whirled to face the parallel processor.
"I've switched a few jumpers. The Milliamp Falcon can run current
loops around any of Admin's TTY fighters. She's fast enough."
"Who's your copilot!" inquired Luke, eyeing the hairy hulk that had
just shambled out of the Falcon to join the group."
"Oh. Meet Sixpacca, my Bookie."
The creature emitted an enormous belch and gesticulated wildly with
a wad of tip sheets clenched in one fist. Luke eyed the beercan in the
other dubiously.
"Er, isn't he dr-" Suddenly RS232 emitted an ear-splitting feep and
began to chitter wildly. They turned to see an Admin command group
riding the local bus directly at them.
"That's a shutdown sequence if I ever saw one!" shouted Con,
sprinting into the ship with the others close behind. "Crank up the
sysclock, Brewie!"
"O.K. Con." Luke said grimly "You said this crate was fast enough.
Get us out of here."
"Shut up, kid, you bother me. Initialize this heap, Brewie -- I'll
try to keep their buffers full."
As his Bookie computed the vectors into low core, spurious characters
flashed around the Milliamp Falcon.
"They're firing at us!" shouted Luke. "Can't you do anything?"
"Making the jump to system space takes time, kid." Con growled. "One
missed cycle and you could come down right in the middle of a pack of
stack frames!"
Bright chunks of position-independent code flashed by as the ship
jumped through the kernel page tables. The group emitted a sigh of
relief as they indirected into free space.
========================================================================
Meanwhile, on a distant page in user space...
Two Admin troopers ushered Princess LA36 into a conference room
behind Lord Vadic.
"Moff Tarchive" she spat. "I should have expected to find you hanging
on Vadic's aux cable. I recognized your unique pattern when I was first
brought aboard." She eyed the 0177545 tattoed on his header coldly.
"Charming to the last." Tarchive observed smoothly. "Vadic, have you
retrieved any information?"
"Her resistance to the logic probe is considerable," Vadic rasped.
"Perhaps if we boosted the supply voltage..."
"You've had your chance. Now I would like the Princess to witness the
test that will certify this module fully operational. Today we enable
the -r beam option, and we've chosen the Princess's $HOME of
/usr/alderaan as the primary target.
"No! You can't! /usr/alderaan is an unprotected public directory. We
have no backup tapes! You can't..."
"Then name the rebel i-node!" Tarchive snapped. A voice announced
from a hidden speaker that they'd arrived in /usr.
"2317" she whispered. "They're on /dev/rm5, i-node 2317.
/mnt/dantooine. She turned away.
Tarchive sighed with satisfaction. "There, you see, Lord Vadic? She
can be reasonable. Proceed with the operation."
It took several clock ticks for the words to penetrate. "What?" the
Princess gasped.
"/dev/rm5 is not a currently mounted file system." explained Tarchive
"We require a more visible target to demonstrate the power of the rm-
star. We will, of course, mount an attack on /mnt/dantooine as soon as
possible.
As she watched in horror Tarchive typed `ls -la' on a nearby terminal.
The screen showed
.: no such directory
Abruptly the Princess double-spaced and went offline.
========================================================================
Meanwhile, the Milliamp Falcon hurtled through free space...
Con Sole0 finished checking the control and status registers, finally
satisfying himself that they'd lost the Admin bus signals as they'd
passed the terminator. An irritable belch from Sixpacca disturbed him
not at all; he knew the Bookie got grouchy when losing at chess, and
RS232 had just caught him in the Fischer set with a seven-ply search.
Across the room Luke was too busy practicing bit-slice technique to
notice the commotion.
"On a word boundary, Luke," said PDP-1 "Don't just hack at it.
Remember, the bytesaber is the ceremonial weapon of the Red-Eye Knight.
It is used to trim offensive lines of code. Handwaving won't get you
anywhere. Attune yourself with the Source."
Luke turned back towards the drone humming in the air beside him.
This time his attack complemented its actions perfectly.
Con Sole0 was not impressed. "Forget this bit-slicing stuff. Give me
a good old PROM blaster any day!"
"Glork!" said PDP-1 indistinctly. He looked momentarily vacant.
"What's wrong?" asked Luke.
"Strange. I thought I felt a disturbance in the /src. It's gone now."
"We're coming up on user space!" called Sole0 from the CSR. They
slipped safely through stack frames and emerged in the new context, only
to find themselves bombarded by floating freeblocks.
"What the..." gasped Sole0. The Bookie belched unhappily. The screen
showed
/usr/alderaan: not found
"This is the right i-node, but it's been cleared! Brewie, where's the
nearest file?"
The Bookie was beginning to belch a reply when he was interrupted by
a bright flash off to the left.
"Admin TTY fighters!" Con shouted "A whole DZ of them. Where are they
coming from?"
"The host system can't be far." said PDP-1 "They've all got direct
EIA connections."
As Sole0 began evasive action the ship lurched suddenly. Luke noticed
that the link count was 3 and climbing rapidly.
"This is no ordinary file..." murmered Kenobi "Look at that ODS
directory structure ahead! They seem to have us in a tractor feed."
"There's no way we can unlink in time." said Sole0 "We're going in."
The Milliamp Falcon was swiftly pulled down to the open collector of
the Admin module. Lord Vadic surveyed the battered ship as Admin Storm-
Flunkies searched for passengers.
"The ls scan shows no one on board, sir" was the report. Vadic was
unconvinced.
"Send a fully equipped ncheck squad aboard. I want every location in
that thing searched." He stalked away.
Aboard the Falcon .Luke was puzzled. "They just walked in, looked
around, and walked out...why didn't they see us?"
.Con smiled. "Old munchkin trick. See that period in front of your
name?"
.Luke spun around in time to glimpse the decimal point. "Huh? Where'd
that come from?"
"Spare part from the last time I tinkered with the floating-point
accelerator" said .Con. "Handy for smuggling blocks across file system
boundaries, but I never thought I'd have to use them on myself. They
aren't going to stay fooled for long, though. We'd better figure a way
out of here."
"I can sneak us into their private space during the next maintenance
period" said PDP-1 "We'll have to find out how to unlink the Falcon
before we can escape."
Some time later our heroes catfooted their way through an empty
section of the structure.
"Find us a terminal." whispered PDP-1. Con nodded and poked his PROM-
blaster around a corner.
You are in the Hall of the Mountain King, with passages off in all
directions.
A large green fierce snake bars the way!
"Oops! Wrong turn." Con muttered. They took the opposite direction.
Suddenly marching feet sounded at the other end of the corridor. They
ducked through the nearest door.
The lone StormFlunky in the room barely had time to register surprise
before Con's blaster de-rezzed him.
"That's funny..." Luke said "I wonder why he was carrying an axe?..."
"Look! We're in luck!" said 3CPU. "He was logged in!".
"Don't just stand there, Kenobi, su it! said Con eagerly. The old
Red-Eye stepped up to the keyboard. They watched as he began to
infiltrate the Admin software. Some minutes later...
You have new mail
"Is that an error?" Con said.
"%SYS-W-NORMAL...I don't think so. Someone here must know me -- but I
can't stop to investigate that now. I've found the i-node they've tied
the Milliamp Falcon to. I'll have to slip in and patch the reference
count, alone." He disappeared through a nearby exit().
Meanwhile, RS232 had found a serial port and gone on-line. He began
to chitter furiously.
"He keeps saying `She's here, she's here!'." explained 3CPU "I do
believe he means Princess LA36. She's being held on one of the
privileged levels.
Luke remembered sculpted curves. "We've got to rescue her!"
RS232 flashed a complete structure chart of the Admin module on the
terminal screen. Four heads bent intently over the diagram.
"I think I see a promising access method" said Luke "...through here.
Con, you and I and Sixpacca will knock out a couple of Admin Storm-
Flunkies and use their uniforms. We'll keep a channel open to these
'droids..."
"...and get terminated as soon as their security catches wise." broke
in Sole0 "Oh well -- I guess I don't have much of a choice."
RS232 twittered reproachfully at him. A planning phase or two later
they slipped into the corridor again, with Luke clad in the ex-
StormFlunky's uniform.
"So far, so good..." whispered Luke as the party came up on the last
turn in their route. "...but 3CPU told us there'd be two guards posted
around this corner."
"Sixpacca still doesn't have a uniform!" Con hissed.
"That's O.K -- I've got an idea. Listen..."
A minute later the two walked boldly around the corner towards the
two guards, Sixpacca held between them and rumbling plaintively.
"Good day, eh?" said the first guard.
"How's it goin', eh?" said the second. "Like, what's that, eh?"
"Control transfer from block 1138, dev 10/9, one for the brig." said
Con, voice muffled by the StormFlunky mask. "Caught him drunk and disor-
derly -- commander said to bring him down here to cool off."
"Take off, it is not!" said the first guard. "Nobody told *us* about it,
and we're not morons, eh?"
The Bookie suddenly emitted a gargantuan belch, surged out of the
grip of his quondam captors and began hurling beercans in all direc-
tions.
"Look out, he's *loose*! yelled Con. He and Luke started blasting ROMS
left and right. The guards had no time to catch on before the beams hit
them.
"Quickly, now" said Con "which buffer is she in? It won't take long
for the Admins..." the intercom interrupted him, so he took out its
firmware with a short blast "...to zero in on that commotion."
Minutes later Luke found the interface card he'd been looking for.
The three followed the cables to a soundproof enclosure. He lifted the
lid to peer inside.
"Aren't you a little slow for FCL?" printed Princess LA36.
"Wha? Oh, the Docksiders." He took off his shoes (for industry) and
explained "I've come to relocate you. I'm Luke Vaxhacker."
Suddenly, forms began to burst all around them. "They've blocked the
queue!" shouted Sole0. "There's only one way out of this stack!"
"OVER HERE! said LA36, printing with overstrikes. "THROUGH THIS
LOOPHOLE!" Luke and the Princess disappeared into a nearby feature.
"Belch!" said Sixpacca dubiously, obviously reluctant to trust an
Admin oversight.
"I don't care how crufty it is!" shouted Con, pushing the Bookie
toward the crock. "BLT yourself in there pronto!"
With a last blast that de-rezzed two StormFlunkies Con joined them,
only to wince in dismay. The "feature" had landed them in the middle of
a garbage-collection area. Data chunks that hadn't been accessed in
weeks floated in pools of decaying bits.
"Bletch!" was Con's first comment. "And foo and barf!" was his
second. The Bookie looked as though he'd just payed off a 555-to-1 long
shot. Luke was polling the garbage for useful items.
"What's this?" He dusted off a flat black box with a panel display on
one side and "Don't Panic" in large friendly letters on the others.
"This can't possibly help us now." he said, and tossed it aside. The
Bookie was about to lay odds on it when he disappeared.
He popped up across the pool, shouting "This is no feature, it's a
bug!" and promptly vanished again.
Con and the Princess were close to panic when Luke reappeared. "What
happened?" they queried concurrently.
"I don't know!" Luke gasped. The bug just automagically dissolved, as
far as I could tell. Maybe it hit a breakpoint."
"I don't think so." Con said. "Look how the pool is shrinking. I've
got a bad feeling about this..."
The princess was the first to catch on. "They've implemented a new
compaction algorithm!" she exclaimed.
Luke remembered their channel to the 'droids. "RS232 -- shut down
that recursion, quick!"
Back in the control room RS232 searched the process table for a LISP
interpreter. "Hurry!" said 3CPU. "Hurry, hurry!" added his other two
processors. RS232 found the LISP, interrupted it, and altered the stack
frame to allow a normal return.
"Scramble as many local control paths as you can from there and head
back to the ship." Luke ordered. "We've got the Princess!"
========================================================================
Meanwhile, PDP-1 made his way deep into the core of the rm-star,
using his ability to manipulate label_t to slip from context to context
undetected. Finally he caused a random trap and (through nofault of his
own) arrived at the central i-node table.
Activity there was always high, but the Spl6 sentries were too secure
in their belief that no mere user could interrupt them to notice the bug
that PDP-1 introduced. He twiddled the i-node and device numbers on a
passing input, carefully maintaining parity, to free the Milliamp
Falcon. They would be long gone before the corrupted i-node was
diagnosed...
He began traversing module structures towards the subprocess where
the Falcon had been grounded. During the context switch he felt his
priority drop. "That's not nice!" he muttered, then recognized the dark
shape before him.
"I have waited a long time for this event, PDP-1 Kenobi!" rasped Dec
Vadic. "We meet again at last; the circuit is closed."
They looped several times, locking bytesabers. Mesmerized by the
sight, the few StormFlunkies nearby failed to notice Luke, Con,
Sixpacca, the Princess and the droids until they'd nearly gained the
Falcon's input port. A brief firefight blazed as the six hurled them-
selves into the ship, but PDP-1 and Lord Vadic seemed too absorbed in
their duel to notice. Luke paused at the port, his gaze riveted on the
pair. He gasped; was that phase jitter he saw around the old version?
"If my blade finds its mark" Kenobi warned "you will be resolved to
your component bits -- but if you slice me down I will only gain compu-
ting power."
"Your documentation no longer confuses me, old version!" Vadic
rasped. "My status is bus-master now!" With a sweeping stroke his
bytesaber sliced through Kenobi's declaration list. As PDP-1's main
body shimmered away Vadic noticed his UID go negative. Odd, he thought,
since UID's are unsigned...
Vadic whirled to face the Falcon just as the others dragged a
protesting Luke into the ship.
"We will meet again...Luke!" he rasped softly to himself, as the ship
blasted free.
As the Milliamp Falcon hurtled away from the rm-star, the droids
were uncharacteristically silent, and Princess LA36 printed comforting
messages for Luke. He was unconsolable, hung from the loss of his
friend. But strangely, it seemed as though he heard PDP-1's voice in the
distance, saying
May the Source be with you!
Re: DecWars
Author: re... Jim Rees
Date: Wed, 12 Sep 1990 00:26
Date: Wed, 12 Sep 1990 00:26
42 lines
2447 bytes
2447 bytes
In article <1990Sep6.023937.23098@mdbs.uucp>, zed@mdbs.uucp (Bill Smith) writes:
A long time ago, on a node far, far away (from ucbvax)
a great Adventure (game?) took place...
This isn't exactly the same version I have, but I think it's a little
dishonest to remove the original attribution. Here is the list of authors
as posted to net.sources by Alan Hastings in May 1982. I won't bother
posting the while original text, which is very similar but is more VMS
oriented (for example, it's Princess _LPA0: instead of Lpr).
>>From stolaf!hastings Wed May 26 15:59:31 1982
Subject: DEC WARS anthology
Newsgroups: net.sources
This is what comes of so many hours deeply submerged in UNIX and VMS,
thoughts moiling around while debugging system core dumps. Thoughts
carefully kept in check, hidden from the light of day (for obvious
reasons), until one day... Perhaps it was the Coke. Perhaps... no,
let us just say that we found a fairly harmless way to vent these
frustrations, these things that nobody within 50 miles could understand.
The network, yes, the network. They'll understand!
I'm not going to take the blame for this alone. It's those guys at CWRU
who first tried to stick it all together; this is merely an extension of
that effort. If anybody can finish it, please do. The bar room scene
is courtesy the folks at cwruecmp, as is much of the (dis)continuity.
This is quality stuff, folks. Special thanks to Douglas Adams, Bob and
Dinsdale McKenzie, and the Firesign Theatre.
Alan
Send subpoenas to:
Alan Hastings St. Olaf College (where's that??)
Steve Tarr Carleton College
guilt by association:
Dave Borman St. Olaf College
Barak Pearlmutter, Clayton
Elwell and Mark Honton Case Western Reserve University
(no, they're not enlisted)
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