Ken Thompson

So no, unfortunately, we did not simply stop at hashes.

And in 1979, five years after we started baking our password in a one-way function, Ken Thompson and once again Robert Morris came up with the idea of the password salt, which is a name that is 100% approved by this podcast.

When you are salting your password, you are adding a little extra flavor to it, a little something to make it more than just a bland password.

A secret ingredient, you might call it, that makes it a bit hard to determine what were the original ingredients that led to the final dish.

And there was one guy named Ross Quinlan who had been looking at compressing chess end games using decision trees.

And so the idea there was that Ken Thompson, who was one of the inventors of Unix, he was still at Bell Labs and he had been reverse enumerating chess end games.

So start from a lost position and play the game backwards and try to build giant lookup tables that say if you're in this board state, and there would be relatively few pieces on the table, say a king and a rook versus a king and a knight.

And so he would develop a complete look at all possible board configurations of king and rook, king and knight, and figure out which ones were winning for each side or draws.

They open with history.

Ken Thompson built Unix in a month.

IBM's OS 360 took roughly a thousand engineers and 5,000 man-years, which is the mythical man-month story.

Linux 7.2 shipped in nine weeks, with 2,600 developers from 300 companies.

Clean writes it down in 1951.

And nobody builds it into software until Ken Thompson puts it into the QED editor on MIT's CTSS and publishes Regular Expression Search Algorithm in the Communications of the ACM in June of 1968.

Korn, first implementation.

Herman, first one.

And so I mean, any...

And I mean, Ken Thompson had the room next to the coffee machine, you know?

Yeah.

And they all loved music.

So now here's a narrow background.

Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and a bunch of other guys sitting in AT&T Bell Labs research have come out of this environment where there was an attempt to do a similar thing for the operating system, Multics, which was this sprawling project to let's build the best interactive operating system we can.

And they brought every vendor in the planet into the room.

And the whole thing exploded into a specification mess of 123 different options.