From: Tony Williams 

John Beamish wrote:

>
> Minisystems?  I'm sure that many of them were easily brought to their
> knees (it was a relatively cheap market to enter so everybody did).  But
> I wasn't talking about them.

Some were more secure than others. The AT&T 3b2 had a pretty secure
lock on the front panel and you couldn't get root without turning the key.
John O probably knows the details better than I, but my understanding is
that there were security cutoffs built into the hardware.

> Your argument about Cadillacs and Novas introduces the deactivation
> discussion.  It's not relevant to this discussion but you and I are in
> complete agreement about it.

Dunno about Cadillacs, but the Nova 3 could be programmed from the front
panel switches. In fact, you had to toggle in a boot loader to get it to go
at all - security by obscurity at its finest.

--
Tony

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5