I understand the Sys/34 isn't exactly a hot topic these days but think about 
it. We have come a long way in security issues.

To humor myself, I did a little searching on this.

I found the following link from an MC Press topic that basically says the same 
thing.

http://www.mcpressonline.com/forum/showthread.php?13161-Passwords-
Revealed&p=130982

I'd say Wasp would have no trouble hacking into a SYS/34.

reminds me of some 5362's (small s/36's) we had.  We had on more than one 
occasion the 2nd internal hard drive go bad.  And the 3rd party maint firms 
always wanted to simply wipe the whole system and start over. I had a catalog 
in location order and knew besides the userid file, there was only one or two 
files and so who wanted to reload everything when there was only one or two to 
reload.

They would argue that without the userid file you couldn't ipl. Bull puckets, 
you just put in zero in menu and library and the sucker would come right up. I 
was remote and the one guy argued and argued with me. I finally told him, this 
is what I want and he said it will never work. A few minutes later they were 
running and we were reloading the one or two files that we needed to reload.

chris

Saw IBM use PATCH (or it's S/38 equivalent) once. We used a 3rd party
maintenance company who came in to replace a failing 3370 HDA. They decided to
pump the disk since that would save time versus a reload from diskette magazines
(ugh!).

Anyway, they pulled HDAs from here and there and messed with this thing for
hours over a holiday weekend. Finally they figured they had it all together and
powered up. The you-know-what hit the fan. They managed to mix up the physical
order of one or more HDAs. They powered off and put them back together right but
during the first boot the machine marked the drives somehow and still would not IPL.

The gave up after almost two days and nights and called in IBM, an old guy named
Joe. He was not in a good mood at 3:00 am. The guy on the other end of the line
was in Rochester, MN, he was also not in a good mood. Joe had to use PATCH to
hex edit some master boot kind of thing so the machine knew where the drives
were supposed to be. He IPL'd and the machine came up.

Unfortunately, the decision to pump was not the right one: the disc had
corrupted data on it and we had to reload anyway. We had diskette magazines
lined up the length of the hall the computer room. But we got it done: elapsed
time was in excess of 4 days!

Several things happened as a result of this debacle:

The 3rd party maintenance firm was fired summarily.
IBM was re-hired on the spot.
The company ordered a reel-to-reel tape drive the next day to replace diskettes.

I never used patch on the s/36 (never messed with the 34). I know there was 
some use for it on the /36 if you had a disk area messed up I think but never 
had that.

I do remember my dad in the late 1960's and early 1970's on a NCR Century 100, 
that because compile times were long, that you would go and if there was a 
minor program change, instead of recompiling, you would go and simply go into 
the various memory locations and change the commands that were running, as I 
recall as the machine had a dial operator console... Recall the machine ran one 
job at a time, and so you simply let the program load, then turned on the halt 
switch and dialed them in.

You would dial the address you wanted to change, press a button, then put in 
the new value you wanted, and move onto the next.

here is a picture of the console: 
http://www.computermuseum.org.uk/pictures/NCR100_front.gif

While the system/3 had dials, I vaguely remember them really only being used by 
the CE, I don't remember using them on a daily basis. Of course the s/36 
had "dials" so to speak under the lid (o.k. they were push buttons) but you 
would put in like FF00 and press for it to load up differently, been a few days 
since did that.

I recall dials on the Univac 90/30 that while the typical user would use to 
point the machine to the removable drive that you were "booting" from, the CE's 
would use when there was a problem to read out various values, etc. if they had 
to go that route.

 

I don't know about the bit twiddling, but I remember PATCH.  Mostly I remember 
that if you are using PATCH, it's a pretty good indication you are not having 
a good day.

I found something.

It is written on a yellow legal pad sheet of paper to my boss at the time.
My daughter was born while working for this employer so it is 28-29 years ago.
My employer was an accounting firm with service bureau clients on the Sys/34.
My boss liked to bring potential clients to the office late at night after 
sufficient drinking to show off our Sys/34. For some reason my boss changed 
his password one night and then upon sobering in the AM, had forgotten it.

He said Kg, figure out my password. In those days I wasn't Kg and I wasn't old.

I had it figured up to the very last step and discovered it while looking over 
the shoulder of the SE who came in for a hefty fee to figure it out. I believe 
I was looking at the diskette(big 8 inch floppy) that contained the security 
file backup. 

Here is what is on the yellow sheet. Does it sound accurate? Ring any bells? 
What do some of you fellow old timers think?

1. Translate location of #secfle to sectors.
2. Translate sector location to hex
3. On console type in 'PATCH'.
4. Enter sector location
5. Printable hex will be on screen
6. Non printable hex ie. encoded passwords will also be there.
7. Take hex - convert to bits ie 0110 0001 etc.
8. Turn on's off and off's on ie 1001 1110.
9. Retranslate to hex. Retranslate to charecters.