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>I had a free account on MIT-AI at some point in the late 70s. I accessed it over the ARPANET!

My understanding is that, during the open access era, if you entered the wrong password the system would ask whether you wanted an account. Is that accurate?

How long did your account last? When did the mass revoking of non-MIT accounts occur? Or was there no such revoking, and accounts just expired from disuse?

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ITS didn't really have password control, one was technically added but IIRC it was a fig leaf on some requirement from outside MIT. The user accounts were there mostly to inform others who was logged on and who owned what process.

You could login either using terminal through ARPAnet dial-in support, or later over network, and over time there was added a more concrete "tourist" policy.

DonHopkins seems to have an interesting writeup https://donhopkins.medium.com/mit-ai-lab-tourist-policy-f73b...

and of course there's PDP-10 org and its gather docs on github: https://github.com/PDP-10/its

This was a long time ago, but I think you’re correct. If the system didn’t recognize you, it asked if you wanted an account. I only used the account for a year or so, mostly to access some mailing lists. I assume it died of neglect.

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