[Coco] Re: OS Vulnerabilities

[John E. Malmberg]

Ward Griffiths wrote:
> On Saturday 28 February 2004 03:26 pm, John E. Malmberg wrote:
> 
> 
>>UNIX came from an environment were it was designed primarily for
>>embedded process control, and development of such.
> 
> That is very far from the case.  Unix was originally designed to (1) 
> support a space travel simulation game and (2) support text processing 
> for Bell Lab's patent department.  Embedding Unix has always been a 
> kluge, as traditional kernels have never been really interupt-driven.

My error.

It was not meant for real time process control, but for specific tasks 
in a dedicated environment.  I do think that ATT was using it for some 
process control.

But my point was that protection from hostile users or external attacks 
was not part of the original design.

UNIX/LINUX has come a long way from those early days, and the security 
implementations and number of holes vary with each different variant.


OpenVMS can do real time programming, but I would tend to use dedicated 
embedded processors or a PLC for that these days, and then feed what 
results are needed back up the chain.

At one job I had, the PLCs used the 6809 processor and ran OS-9.

-John
wb8tyw at qsl.net
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