Yes Minister was a British political satire following the misadventures of a fictional member of parliament ('Jim Hacker') and his permanent under secretary ('Sir Humphrey Appleby'). Yes Minister was produced by the BBC and ran from 1980 to 1982, returning in 1986 with a sequel 'Yes Prime Minister' in which Jim Hacker became Prime Minister. Yes Prime Minister ran from 1986 to 1988. Research Yes Minister
Paul Eddington was an English actor. He was born in 1927 at London and died in 1995. He is best known for his role as 'Jerry' the next door neighbour in the 1970's television series 'The Good Life' and later as 'Jim Hacker' in the 1980's television series 'Yes Minister' Research Paul Eddington
In computing, a backdoor is a secret point of entry to a computer program or computer. Legitimate backdoors may be created by a system developer, but more commonly they are used by hackers for penetrating a computer over a network. The most popular method of establishing a backdoor to a computer is through the 'Backdoor Mail Spam' in which an unsolicited email is sent to a victim with a
backdoor program attached to it. This backdoor program will be disguised (a Trojan) pretending to be perhaps a computer game or a screensaver. Further, the email may pretend to originate from a trusted source, such as the mail program of the network or a well-known computer company. When the recipient executes the attachment, the backdoor program installs itself secretly onto the computer and monitors a predefined port on the network waiting to allow a hacker in 'through the back door'. Research Backdoor
In computing, Conway's Law is the rule that the organisation of the software and the organisation of the software team will be congruent; originally stated as 'If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler'. This was originally promulgated by MelvinConway, an early proto-hacker who wrote an assembler for the Burroughs 220 called SAVE. The name `SAVE' didn't stand for anything; it was just that you lost fewer card decks and listings because they all had SAVE written on them. Research Conway's Law
CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) is an early microcomputer OS written by hacker Gary Kildall for 8080 and Z80 based machines. It was very popular in the late 1970s but was virtually wiped out by MS-DOS after the release of the IBMPC in 1981. Legend has it that Kildall's company blew its chance to write the OS for the IBMPC because Kildall decided to spend a day IBM's reps wanted to meet with him enjoying the perfect flying weather in his private plane. Many of CP/M's features and conventions strongly resemble those of early DEC operating systems such as TOPS-10, OS/8, RSTS, and RSX-11. Research CP/M
FTP Bounce is a method of hacking or breaking into a computer network and exploits a security hole in many FTP servers that allow the FTP server to open a connection to any computer connected to it via the 'port' command, allowing the clientcomputeraccess to a computer it would not otherwise be allowed to access. Using this method of attack, a hacker can log into one computer on the internet, and tell that computer (via the FTP port command) to log in to another computer on the internet. The target computer being unaware of the hacker's real computer identity or IP address. The solution, in simple terms, is to use an FTP server that does not allow connections to any computer other than the client, and to use separate computers on the network for FTP servers etc, with 'firewall' protection software between them. Research FTP Bounce
MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System) is a clone of CP/M for the 8088 put together in six weeks by hacker Tim Paterson, who is said to have regretted it ever since. It has numerous features, including vaguely UNIX-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into version 2. 0 and subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting mess is now the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS, which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name further annoys those who know what the term operating system does (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively simple interrupt services. Research MS-DOS
Spacewar is a space-combat simulation game, inspired by E. E. 'Doc' Smith's 'Lensman' books, in which two spaceships duel around a central sun, shooting torpedoes at each other and jumping through hyperspace. The game was first implemented on the PDP-1 at MIT in 1960.
SPACEWAR aficionados formed the core of the early hacker culture at MIT. Nine years later, a descendant of the game motivated Ken Thompson to build, in his spare time on a scavenged PDP-7, the operating system that became UNIX. Less than nine years after that, SPACEWAR was commercialise as one of the first video games. Research Spacewar
Twenex was the TOPS-20 operating system by DEC - the second proprietary OS for the PDP-10. TOPS-20 began in 1969 as Bolt, Beranek & Newman's TENEX operating system using special paging hardware. By the early 1970s, almost all of the systems on the ARPANET ran TENEX. DEC purchased the rights to TENEX from BBN and began work to make it their own. The first in-house code name for the operating system was VIROS; when customers started asking questions, the name was changed to SNARK so DEC could truthfully deny that there was any project called VIROS. When the name SNARK became known, the name was briefly reversed to become KRANS; this was quickly abandoned when someone objected that `krans' meant `funeral wreath' in Swedish (though some Swedish speakers have since said it means simply `wreath'; this part of the story may be apocryphal). Ultimately DEC picked TOPS-20 as the name of the operating system, and it was as TOPS-20 that it was marketed. The hacker community, mindful of its origins, quickly dubbed it TWENEX (a contraction of `twenty
TENEX'), even though by this point very little of the original TENEX code remained (analogously to the differences between AT&T V6 UNIX and BSD). DEC people cringed when they heard 'TWENEX', but the term caught on nevertheless (the written abbreviation ` 20x' was also used). TWENEX was successful and very popular; in fact, there was a period in the early 1980s when it commanded as fervent a culture of partisans as UNIX or ITS but DEC's decision to scrap all the internal rivals to the VAXarchitecture and its relatively stodgy VMSOS killed the DEC-20 and put a sad end to TWENEX's brief day in the sun. DEC attempted to convince TOPS-20 hackers to convert to VMS, but instead, by the late 1980s, most of the TOPS-20 hackers had migrated to UNIX. Research Twenex
The Probert Encyclopaedia was designed, edited and programed by
Matt and Leela Probert
Abbreviations
Research Yes Minister
