My highschool had a lab of these in the early 90's. I would spend every lunch hour up there. Got my first exposure to a unix command line, although the commands were slightly different, ie. frel -> rm.
I eventually figured out a few ways to give myself root. The passwords in the password file were not hashed. First method was to spoof the login prompt. Ran it remotely from another computer on another computer that I knew the teacher would always log into. Once I succeeded in getting root's password, I put another method into one of the boot up scripts which would copy the password file somewhere else if another file was present. All I had to do then was just reboot a computer to get root's password. Later I was able to figure out the memory location where the group and user number was stored by comparing the memory dumps while being logged in as various users. Then I just needed to poke those memory locations, start a new shell, and I was root.
It's a shame that these computers have kind of disappeared. They are a part of computing history, for Ontario at least. I've contacted a few people online that still have hardware. Everyone seems to be unwilling to share what they have.
To preserve the history, I think it would help if they could be emulated. Even a modern web browser probably possesses enough computer power to emulate them. They ran on a 286, at least the early ones did.
The computers had a C compiler and Pascal interpreter made by Watcom out of Waterloo. QNX was the OS, which is also out of Waterloo I believe. So overall, the system supported a few Ontario based companies.
There was a trackball integrated into the case. Some buttons on the keyboard acted as buttons for the mouse cursor.
One of the most popular programs on these computers was a program called FGED. It would save animations that could be played back later. Some people would spend hours creating them, then later play them back for their friends.
They had the entire suite of Watcomm products: APL, Basic, Cobol, Fortran, Pascal. The Watcomm tools were great, there was some magical linker that let you connect Cobol and Fortran tools together.
Burroughs was always big on being able to network computers together. Their B20 line was awesome on the amount of sharing you could do between systems. Lots of sites had one or two machines with disks on them, the rest would use the network to get to the data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_B20
After heavy criticism for a decade, the government ceased all support for the ICON in 1994 and ordered all ICON hardware to be sent to landfill and software to be destroyed.
This is a sad part of history, I vividly remember hearing this had happened. Growing up in Ontario with computer labs full of these up until the mid to late 90's, graph paper hanging on the walls with LOGO programs, and games, so many games (Oregon trail, Cross Country Canada), and then they started getting replaced with PC's in classrooms. I remember missing a local auction or something that had a bunch of these Burroughs (later Unisys) ICONs for $5/$10, but without the LEXICON server they were functionally useless, I still regret not picking one up.
It's disappointing. I'm sure the rationale at the time was that it was an under-powered and obsolete machine, but many schools in Ontario were far behind and having these machines go to other places would have been helpful.
But that might have meant software and support costs, and can't have that.
Oh the memories of being a “reading buddy” in middle school circa 1993 and seeing the memo posted on the second grade classroom bulletin board plainly stating username / password was last name / first name of teachers.
From there, somehow the GUI made it possible to trackball-and-action-key my way to admin privileges and change the login motd for everyone in the school.
My downfall was sharing that info with more destructive classmates who changed the password of the administrator and supposedly almost got me charged with mischief.
Keyboarding class in grade 9 though was made a bit more interesting despite already being able to touch type, as I somehow figured out how to drop to the (quite limited) QNX command prompt.
I went to high school in Ontario around this time but I never saw these machines. Our computer lab was a bunch of networked Commodore 64s that we used for learning Waterloo Structured BASIC.
“A day in the life” (I think?) was the popular one at my school. I think because there was a way to go to an arcade and play a video game within the game.
I eventually figured out a few ways to give myself root. The passwords in the password file were not hashed. First method was to spoof the login prompt. Ran it remotely from another computer on another computer that I knew the teacher would always log into. Once I succeeded in getting root's password, I put another method into one of the boot up scripts which would copy the password file somewhere else if another file was present. All I had to do then was just reboot a computer to get root's password. Later I was able to figure out the memory location where the group and user number was stored by comparing the memory dumps while being logged in as various users. Then I just needed to poke those memory locations, start a new shell, and I was root.
It's a shame that these computers have kind of disappeared. They are a part of computing history, for Ontario at least. I've contacted a few people online that still have hardware. Everyone seems to be unwilling to share what they have.
To preserve the history, I think it would help if they could be emulated. Even a modern web browser probably possesses enough computer power to emulate them. They ran on a 286, at least the early ones did.