How security holes happen

[Mark H. Harris]

On Wednesday, March 5, 2014 6:24:52 PM UTC-6, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> 	I must have had a deprived life...
> 
> 	The only "debug" on a home system I ever used was the one in LS-DOS.
> And even then, it was only because an OS update disk arrived with a bad
> sector and could not be copied.

   Not many people realized what they had in front of them. The only reason you
might is if you 'grew up' on a system that required machine coding;  like the
Wang 700 series, or the MITS Altair 8800, or the VIC 20 with VicMon.

   I grew up with all three. So, before I ever learned a line of BASIC I was coding 
machine language (not assembler) on the three platforms above... the wang 
used integrated circuits, but had to processor chip;  the MITS used the very first
8080 chip from Intel, and the VIC 20 used the 6502 from Motorola. My first 
personal computer (I did not own it, it was temporarily loaned to me) was the 
VIC 20.  It only had 5k of memory, so anyone who did any real programming 
on it purchased the VicMon cartridge which was a 'machine language monitor'.
It was "DEBUG.COM" for the VIC 20. 

   When I got the first copy of DOS on floppy and saw DEBUG.COM I knew 
instantly what it was... a machine language monitor system for reading and 
writing machine code (8086 / 8088) in memory, or to disk sectors, or to disk
as a file-name.  It wasn't just a debugger---hardly! It was (and still is, yes, I 
still use it) a simple clean full-blown machine language monitor capable today
just as then, to build sophisticated applications with 1's and 0's/

   It was also my cup of tea, as it were.  The folks who used the MITS Altair 8800
hated punching code in by hand; gets old fast.  But not for me. I loved it, because
I was as interested in the 8080 processor as I was in writing programs for it; it was
great fun experimenting with memory and the processor.

   marcus