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I'm having a hard time finding documents describing Mesa's capability system, although the term capability system has come up repeatedly in conversation, so I'm intrigued as to what this refers to exactly. Any documents that you can point us to? Thanks.

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I'm an author of the Pilot paper (and also a participant in the much earlier capability-oriented CAL TSS for the Control Data 6400: https://www.mcjones.org/CalTSS/). Pilot was a long time ago, but as I recall its capabilities were just Mesa records with some "option" bits plus a unique identifier for the file. So a malicious program could easily fabricate one.

http://www.cap-lore.com/CapTheory/

Thanks!

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