Cracking the Passwords of Early Internet Pioneers
Lots of them weren’t very good:
BSD co-inventor Dennis Ritchie, for instance, used “dmac” (his middle name was MacAlistair); Stephen R. Bourne, creator of the Bourne shell command line interpreter, chose “bourne”; Eric Schmidt, an early developer of Unix software and now the executive chairman of Google parent company Alphabet, relied on “wendy!!!” (the name of his wife); and Stuart Feldman, author of Unix automation tool make and the first Fortran compiler, used “axolotl” (the name of a Mexican salamander).
Weakest of all was the password for Unix contributor Brian W. Kernighan: “/.,/.,” representing a three-character string repeated twice using adjacent keys on a QWERTY keyboard. (None of the passwords included the quotation marks.)
I don’t remember any of my early passwords, but they probably weren’t much better.
Tatütata • October 15, 2019 11:27 AM
Cute! At least most passwords seem publishable…
I would love to learn what Donald E. Knuth’s passwords used to look like.
I created an account on some system which imposes a mixed-case password including at least one number and a non-alphanumeric character. I used a script that generates a string according to the requirement, e.g., z6E7~yiw0Rl’Yq.
Yesterday, hardly four months later the bl**dy site, warns me that the password must be renewed, and asks “security” questions, of which none maps squarely with my case. Mother’s maiden name? In which alphabet? With diacritics? Model of my first car? I loathe cars, and never had one. Name of my first pet? That would depend on the meaning of “my”, and our pets had rather variable identification… And do goldfish have names?
Luckily I had written down the “answers” I had provided to the “security” questions.
Regarding Stuart Feldman, that would be Fortran 77, seventy-seven, and not the original Backus FORTRAN (in all-caps) of 1953. The early compilers (IBM System/360 G-level compiler for the FORTRAN 66 dialect) used dozens of overlay passes to finally excrete object code.