"The hackers who wrote the Incompatible Timesharing
System decided that file protection was usually used by
a self-styled system manager to get power over everyone
else," Stallman would later explain. "They didn't want
anyone to be able to get power over them that way, so
they didn't implement that kind of a feature. The
result was, that whenever something in the system was
broken, you could always fix it."See Richard Stallman (1986).
Through such vigilance, hackers managed to keep the AI
Lab's machines security-free. Over at the nearby MIT
Laboratory for Computer Sciences, however,
security-minded faculty members won the day. The LCS
installed its first password-based system in 1977. Once
again, Stallman took it upon himself to correct what he
saw as ethical laxity. Gaining access to the software
code that controlled the password system, Stallman
implanted a software command that sent out a message to
any LCS user who attempted to choose a unique password.
If a user entered "starfish," for example, the message
came back something like: I see you chose the password
"starfish.
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