What do you think of this fact?
Passwords feel as old as computers, but someone had to come up with them. Computer historians mostly point to MIT and a system called CTSS, the Compatible Time-Sharing System, led by Fernando Corbató. BRG dates the first recorded use of computer passwords to 1961.
Why a computer needed a lock
CTSS let several people use one big computer at the same time, each with their own private files. So Corbató gave every user a password. „Putting a password on for each individual user as a lock seemed like a very straightforward solution“, he later said. He never insisted on being first, though: IBM’s Sabre booking system from 1960 might have used passwords earlier, but IBM could not confirm it.
The passwords sat in a master file. According to Today I Found Out, they were stored in plain text.
The hack that was really a print job
Allan Scherr, a PhD student, had a problem: he was allowed just four hours of computer time per week, and his simulations needed far more. His solution was almost embarrassingly simple. Printing jobs were requested with a punched card, so he submitted one asking for the password file. The next morning, he picked up the printout.
With everyone’s passwords in hand, he could log in as other users and use their time. He also handed passwords to others. According to Gizmodo, J.C.R. Licklider used one to log into the account of lab director Robert Fano and left taunting messages there. For years nobody suspected him. Scherr only confessed about 25 years later.
Bonus fact: In 1966, CTSS leaked all its passwords again, this time without any help: a software mix-up swapped the welcome message with the password file, so everyone who logged in saw every password.
The inventor’s verdict
Corbató did not grow fond of his creation. In a 2014 interview with the Wall Street Journal, he called passwords „kind of a nightmare“, because nobody can remember them all.
So the password was cracked before it was even grown up, and its own inventor ended up agreeing it was a pain.