[Cryptography] Buffer overflows from 1974

[John Levine]

According to Jon Callas <jon at callas.org>:
>> On Jan 5, 2026, at 18:09, Peter Gutmann via cryptography <cryptography at metzdowd.com> wrote:
>> 
>> is an ASR3x, not a VT52.
>
>The early unix people were pretty obviously two-finger typists on an ASR33. Stupid curly braces.

Having been there at the time I can say we did indeed mostly use ASR33 upper
case only Teletypes. The Unix tty driver converted upper case input to lower
case with \x escapes for upper case input, which was good enough. There were
a few more escapes like \( \) for { }.

The 33 printed both lowercase and uppercase letters as uppercase.

I believe that Bell Labs had a bunch of otherwise obscure model 37 Teletypes
that had upper and lower cae and ran at a blistering 15 cps. There was also an
even more obscure model 38, based on the 33, which could use wider 132 position
paper and had upper and lower case.

But most of us used those model 33's.

R's,
John

PS: For all the details, the Unix 5th edition tty driver documentation
starts at page 224 here http://squoze.net/UNIX/v5man/all.pdf
-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl at taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
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