Fernando J. Corbató

The system would then prompt them for a password, which could be typed but would not be shown in the screen, to avoid those shoulder surfers that try to take a peek at things they shouldn't.

Pretty cool, right? This system, which was devised by Fernando Corbató, was the beginning of password usage in our computing world, and the start of a legacy that is very important to cybersecurity nowadays.

Unfortunately for the CTSS, hackers always existed, and even this mainframe was not immune to a password theft attack.

In 1962, a PhD researcher at the university, Alan Scher, had spent all of the four available hours per day he was provided to run jobs in the mainframe.

Origin and context.

In the 1960s, when computers started to become an essential tool for big business and government, the late great Dr. Fernando Corbato, one of computing's founding fathers, introduced the idea of using passwords to grant access to mainframe computers and limit computer time to individual users.

Unbeknownst to him, Corbado provided a long list of cyber narrative wells, a never-ending attack vector, to break into computer systems.

In fairness, though, passwords didn't start to really break down as an authentication system until the internet started humming for online transactions circa the mid-1990s.

But in the 1960s, with limited computers and a high demand for time on them, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had a problem to solve.

A team led by Dr. Fernando Corbato proposed a solution.

a time-sharing system.

They compared it to a telephone exchange, a way to allow several users to share a computer, but they needed a way to separate access.