"Without hackers to maintain the system, [faculty members] said, `We're going to have a disaster; we must have commercial software,'" Stallman would recall a few years later. "They said, `We can expect the company to maintain it.' It proved that they were utterly wrong, but that's what they did."
At first, hackers viewed the Twenex system as yet another authoritarian symbol begging to be subverted. The system's name itself was a protest. Officially dubbed TOPS-20 by DEC, it was a successor to TOPS-10, a commercial operating system DEC marketed for the PDP-10. Bolt Beranek Newman had deveoped an improved version, dubbed Tenex, which TOPS-20 drew upon.Multiple sources: see Richard Stallman interview, Gerald Sussman email, and Jargon File 3.0.0. http://www.clueless.com/jargon3.0.0/TWENEX.html Stallman, the hacker who coined the Twenex term, says he came up with the name as a way to avoid using the TOPS-20 name. "The system was far from tops, so there was no way I was going to call it that," Stallman recalls. "So I decided to insert a `w' in the Tenex name and call it Twenex."
The machine that ran the Twenex/TOPS-20 system had its own derisive nickname: Oz. According to one hacker legend, the machine got its nickname because it required a smaller PDP-11 machine to power its terminal. One hacker, upon viewing the KL-10-PDP-11 setup for the first time, likened it to the wizard's bombastic onscreen introduction in the Wizard of Oz. "I am the great and powerful Oz," the hacker intoned. "Pay no attention to the PDP-11 behind that console."See http://www.as.cmu.edu/~geek/humor/See_Figure_1.txt
If hackers laughed when they first encountered the KL-10, their laughter quickly died when they encountered Twenex. Not only did Twenex boast built-in security, but the system's software engineers had designed the tools and applications with the security system in mind. What once had been a cat-and-mouse game over passwords in the case of the Laboratory for Computer Science's security system, now became an out-and-out battle over system management. System administrators argued that without security, the Oz system was more prone to accidental crashes. Hackers argued that crashes could be better prevented by overhauling the source code. Unfortunately, the number of hackers with the time and inclination to perform this sort of overhaul had dwindled to the point that the system-administrator argument prevailed.
Cadging passwords and deliberately crashing the system in order to glean evidence from the resulting wreckage, Stallman successfully foiled the system administrators' attempt to assert control. After one foiled "coup d'etat," Stallman issued an alert to the entire AI staff.
"There has been another attempt to seize power," Stallman wrote. "So far, the aristocratic forces have been defeated." To protect his identity, Stallman signed the message "Radio Free OZ."
The disguise was a thin one at best. By 1982, Stallman's aversion to passwords and secrecy had become so well known that users outside the AI Laboratory were using his account as a stepping stone to the ARPAnet, the research-funded computer network that would serve as a foundation for today's Internet. One such "tourist" during the early 1980s was Don Hopkins, a California programmer who learned through the hacking grapevine that all an outsider needed to do to gain access to MIT's vaunted ITS system was to log in under the initials RMS and enter the same three-letter monogram when the system requested a password.
"I'm eternally grateful that MIT let me and many other people use their computers for free," says Hopkins. "It meant a lot to many people."
This so-called "tourist" policy, which had been openly tolerated by MIT management during the ITS years,See "MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy." http://catalog.com/hopkins/text/tourist-policy.html fell by the wayside when Oz became the lab's primary link to the ARPAnet. At first, Stallman continued his policy of repeating his login ID as a password so outside users could follow in his footsteps. Over time, however, the Oz's fragility prompted administrators to bar outsiders who, through sheer accident or malicious intent, might bring down the system. When those same administrators eventually demanded that Stallman stop publishing his password, Stallman, citing personal ethics, refused to do so and ceased using the Oz system altogether.3
"[When] passwords first appeared at the MIT AI Lab I [decided] to follow my belief that there should be no passwords," Stallman would later say. "Because I don't believe that it's really desirable to have security on a computer, I shouldn't be willing to help uphold the security regime."