> i'm speculating on the design of the auth system. i wasn't > there so i could be wrong. but in order to have a terminal > that many people could log into would require either > (a) killing off the original factotum on logout and changing > eve back to bootes or something. and beware the 1001 places > that stash eve somewhere.
I wasn't there either, but I do have some fuzzy memories of running 2nd edition. Factotum came along later than that. It may have been new with 4th edition. The general impression I always got was two-fold. >From a philosophical point of view, whoever is logged into a terminal is the owner of the hardware. After all, physical access is the ultimate privilege. So if you just don't bother creating a logout mechanism, then the only time the hardware doesn't have an owner is from reset to authenticating a user. The practical side means that a lot gets simpler and a number of concerns go away. If the system reboots between users, there's nothing of the first user left on the terminal when the second user comes along. I don't have to be careful to clean up all the processes, etc left behind; rebooting does that. The old login trojan horses also go away. ^t^tr is grabbed by the kernel and we reboot. It seemed a little strange to me at first, but the more I worked with the system, the more logical it seemed. BLS
