Part 6 of 6
What passwords did the people who built Unix use?
A wife’s name, a surname, a keyboard pattern, and a chess move.
In 2014 an old password file turned up in a public archive of source code for Unix, the 1970s operating system that macOS and Linux are modeled on. It held the scrambled passwords of twenty-three people at Bell Labs and Berkeley, among them the people who built the system. By 2019 enthusiasts had cracked all but one: Dennis Ritchie used dmac (his first initial and middle name), Stephen Bourne used bourne, Eric Schmidt used wendy!!! (his wife’s name), and Brian Kernighan used /.,/.,, a pattern of neighboring keys.
Ken Thompson’s was among the last to fall, in 2019, after more than four days on a modern graphics card: p/q2-q4!, chess notation for a classic opening move.