News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Pilot: An Operating System for a Personal Computer (1980) [pdf].

Re:Pilot: An Operating System for a Personal Computer (1980)... by rbanffy on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @04:10PM (#28923098)
"Pilot's protection mechanisms are defensive, rather than absolute [9], since in a single-user system, errors are a more serious problem than maliciousness"

Oh well... We were so wrong back then...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Pilot: An Operating System for a Personal Computer (1980)... by aidenn0 on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @04:29PM (#28923361)
Well that was true for almost 20 years from the writing of TFA. Yes, there were things like boot-sector viruses, but they were not a huge issue.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Pilot: An Operating System for a Personal Computer (1980)... by rbanffy on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @04:35PM (#28923422)
I'm certainly guilty of being optimistic in terms of threat models back then.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Pilot: An Operating System for a Personal Computer (1980)... by aidenn0 on Wednesday October 20, 2021 @12:29AM (#28926760)
Well it might not have been optimistic in terms of threat models as much as pessimistic in terms of how long the OS would be around...
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Pilot: An Operating System for a Personal Computer (1980)... by rbanffy on Wednesday October 20, 2021 @11:58AM (#28932297)
With barrel CPUs and bounds-checked arrays I had the expectation we could have near perfect process isolation.

That didn’t work out the way I expected either.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Pilot: An Operating System for a Personal Computer (1980)... by apples_oranges on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @04:56PM (#28923658)
This holds still true for many computers today
[ Parent | on HN ]