If LispMs are for monks or nuns, is ITS for sorcerers?
I especially liked how you could patch a running kernel, but only if you entered a specific keystroke sequence the right way the first time. If you muffed it, a flag got set and the system would disallow future attempts even if you got it right later. It's more like a puzzle in a text adventure than an OS security mechanism.
And, of course, the command shell was a machine code debugger, but that really wasn't hugely weird in itself.
I especially liked how you could patch a running kernel, but only if you entered a specific keystroke sequence the right way the first time. If you muffed it, a flag got set and the system would disallow future attempts even if you got it right later. It's more like a puzzle in a text adventure than an OS security mechanism.
And, of course, the command shell was a machine code debugger, but that really wasn't hugely weird in itself.