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Classic Computer Science Papers

Posted by sengan on from the things-to-reread dept.

Dean Chouinard writes "For inspiration I occasionally peruse the web pages of Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan and Ken Thompson. I recently found a pointer to the following classic paper by Ken Thompson. Other interesting papers are listed under the classics directory as well."

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  1. Heard this story at MIT... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3

    My recitation instructor when I took 6.004 at MIT was Steve Ward. (This was 3 or so years ago.) Ward told us this same story. It seems that Ward and Ken Thompson went out to a bar one time, and Thompson was describing how to plant this trojan in a compiler. After a few more drinks, Thompson admitted to actually creating such a compiler, and compiling the login program with it. It worked. Ward kept feeding Thompson drinks, and pressing for more information. But Thompson would never quite say if he actually did anything with it, like if he merged it in on an install tape.

    I expect Thompson didn't do anything with it; I expect he was just holding back to keep an air of mystery around it all. But still... interesting...

    (That's one of my best memories of that class. All us youngins hanging on every word of Ward's story about the "real" hacking done by our heros. Or at least mine. ;)