The Story Behind the "Our Wall" Incident: A Cautionary Tale of Unintended Consequences

In the early days of the internet, a distributed computing group at Berkeley was working on various projects. Jordan Hubbard, who would later become known for his work on free software, was part of this group. One day, while experimenting with new commands, including "our wall," Hubbard sent a message to the entire network, hoping to test its capabilities. Little did he know that his actions would have far-reaching consequences.

As Hubbard sent out the message, it began to propagate across the internet, reaching people on various networks and systems. Since the internet was still in its early stages, not everyone had the same level of connectivity or security measures in place. The "our wall" command allowed the message to spread quickly, and before long, it had reached a significant number of recipients.

Hubbard's decision to send the message without realizing its potential impact led to a chaotic situation. As people started receiving the message on their terminals, many were surprised and annoyed by the sudden influx of emails. The message was often accompanied by multiple lines saying "this is a broadcast message from whoever" followed by the "bell" command, which produced a distinctive ding sound on each terminal.

The reaction to Hubbard's actions was swift and varied. Some people found it amusing or thought-provoking, while others were annoyed and complained to their superiors. The incident quickly gained attention, and some high-ranking officials in the internet community contacted Jordan Hubbard, demanding that he address the issue immediately. They urged him to provide a quick fix for this problem in his next release.

Meanwhile, Hubbard was inundated with messages, which he responded to individually with a standard reply. This led to multiple versions of the same response being circulated around the internet. The incident became a topic of discussion among those who knew Hubbard, and it was seen as a cautionary tale about the potential consequences of experimenting with new technologies.

The impact of this event extended beyond the immediate circle of recipients. It highlighted the need for better security measures and more robust testing procedures in the early days of the internet. The incident also demonstrated the importance of considering the potential consequences of one's actions, even when working on experimental projects.

In the years that followed, Hubbard continued to work on various projects, including his work with free software. While he remained a respected figure in the tech community, this incident became an enduring footnote in his biography. It serves as a reminder of the power and unpredictability of emerging technologies and the need for caution when exploring new ideas.

Despite the initial commotion caused by "our wall," Hubbard's contributions to the world of technology have been significant. His work has had a lasting impact on the development of free software and other projects, cementing his reputation as a talented software engineer. The story of this incident serves as a reminder that even well-intentioned actions can have unintended consequences, highlighting the importance of careful consideration and planning when working with new technologies.

The "our wall" incident also had an interesting side effect: it helped to establish a sense of community among those who worked on the internet in its early days. The fact that someone like Hubbard, who was not affiliated with any particular organization or government agency, could send a message that affected so many people across the globe created a shared experience and a bond among recipients. This incident has become an important part of the history of the internet, serving as a reminder of the power and potential of this emerging technology.

Throughout history, humanity has struggled to fully understand the implications of technological advancements. The "our wall" incident highlights the importance of considering multiple perspectives and evaluating the potential consequences of our actions when working with new technologies. As we continue to push the boundaries of what is possible with computing and communication, it is essential that we learn from this cautionary tale and strive for greater awareness and foresight in our endeavors.

The impact of Hubbard's actions can still be felt today, even decades after the incident occurred. The story has been passed down through the years, serving as a reminder of the importance of careful planning, consideration, and responsibility when working with new technologies. It is a testament to Hubbard's creativity and experimentation that he was able to create an incident that would have such far-reaching consequences.

The "our wall" incident serves as a reminder that even in the most unexpected ways, our actions can have significant effects on those around us. As we navigate the complexities of modern technology, it is essential that we approach new ideas with caution and consider multiple perspectives before acting. By doing so, we can avoid similar incidents and ensure that our technological advancements align with our values and goals.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyeah that is sort of like the the the offline equivalent to somebody finding an address book and literally ringing every number in there or yeah or text text all your contacts you know like oh yeah yeah text all that that sort of thing so it's very similar to that but it's just that in their case all was the entire internet with the original unix systems where we had a system called write where you could write to other people and that was very handy for in fact i'll do a quick screen uh grab of that working this then is an attempt to try and reconstruct what it looked a little like in the 1980s when we were all working on mainframe or mini computers at that time so in this case it was a pdp 1170 which was sitting in the basement there were terminals all around the building all physically wired in so there's a wire from each terminal down through the trunking to the basement and plugged into the back of the pdp 1170 there was a room with about 20 or so terminals that were general use and then the staff people all had terminals in their own office and you'd sit down at the terminal and you'd log in and do whatever you're going to do often the first thing you type is who which would show you who is connected onto the computer who is logged in and who is available and this is kind of a common thing i would see early on there's dave browsford logged in eric foxley andy walker william armitage and a computer file and also me of course as uh systems evolved a little weak we had another command called w which did much the same thing you could see who's logged in there and also what they're running in this case they're all running the shell but you could also see the idle time there this this column down here that would give you an idea of whether they had recently done anything on the computer or whether they'd wandered away so if you wanted to go and talk to someone you could see if they're actually at their computer even better than that you could uh communicate directly with them so there was a small utility called write which allowed you to write to somebody else and this obviously saved you walking around the building to try and find them if you could see they were logged in and uh available you could just go ahead and say right dfb in this case and uh down here you can see a message has appeared then type and uh it would appear there and dfb could write back and you know it's quite primitive but uh we used it quite a lot and write was actually a very simple program it just read a line and wrote it to the user's device that was really very useful during the early days that uh because in the early days we're all connected to the same computer and we're all sort of a big community and if you did something that used up a lot of uh processing power or something everybody would shout at you and you'd get these messages coming to you but it was also good just to uh before wandering around the apartment to go and see if anybody was uh logged into the computer and you could go and chat to them and you can actually see uh the user's device here if you type who then this this line here this tty or a pseudo tty in this case is is the actual uh device and that's actually a device in the file system on unix so you could actually look at that so pts two is dfbs although the security has been uh up since then so i'll have to play a couple of tricks to get this to work you can actually do that directly you can just and just echo something straight into that file and it appears over here on on this file so that's you know it's really quite simple uh as i say uh security's improved since then so you can't do that now and even then though you could say message and that says either yes or no so you could say message no i don't want to receive messages so if he now tried to write it back then it would say sorry he doesn't want to be communicated to at the moment if you're busy but usually most people around with that aren't whatever you happen to be doing it just appeared in the middle of your screen so if you're in the middle of an editor um you know if i put that back on and start adding something here then this just appears splashed across your screen and you have to refresh it to get rid of it so that was uh one system it's kind of like a precursor to the instant messaging i guess but uh very very very primitive as uh as you might show in some of the screen crafts uh then we also had this program called wall which was a sort of a building up from that from right to all users and that was typically used either if things got desperate on the computers that uh somebody was using far too much cpu and it was effective everybody simply might send a wall message to all the users saying okay own up who's burning through all the cpu and slowing all my stuff down but it was also part of the shutdown process if you tried to shut down the computer then usually you'd give it a time and say shut down in five minutes and it would broadcast this message to all the users saying the machine is going down but that used this command called wall and and that would appear on everybody's terminal so uh that was quite a useful thing we didn't i don't think you could use uh wall as a regular user i think you have to be a system admin because it you know splattered across everyone's terminals it was quite fun as we had this room called c30 with the banks of terminals and when somebody sent a wall message it would sort of appear on the first one second accompanied by a load of beeps as well so it would sort of ripple across the whole terminal room saying a machine is going down and you certainly knew about it because they had quite a loud beat these tvi 912s then as we slowly moved into the sort of uh internet networking version of this i remember we received our first couple of sun machines in the department and i started looking at those and seeing what uh commands they had they had another new command called talk where you could that was a bit more interactive and you could chat with somebody with this there was only two ways i remember i think it may have been extended into multi-way later but that was basically like the right you just typed in stuff and uh you could see it but amongst the commands that you got with the new sun system now that we're all networked was a load of commands that were started with r so there's an r shell to log in remotely to a computer which has been subsumed by ssh now a secure shell because it certainly wasn't secure there was an r exec to run programs there was um there was an ahu and a few other things but but you had a bunch of these new commands with the letter r in front of them and while i was looking through them i discovered this command called our wall which was the remote version of wool so you could write to all users across the network and i do remember looking at this and there was some configuration examples and one of the configurations they have this file called netgroups that said this is a sort of a shorthand for who you want to contact so you could sort of say our wall to all people on your local network or pick out a specific set of machines that it would broadcast to but i do remember looking at it and thinking this is a bit odd because there's a universal group there and they defined the universal group as sort of the absence of everything so you could say i think which users you want to talk to which machines and which networks but if you missed all of those out then the default was to send it to everywhere literally everywhere literally everywhere that was fine on at nottingham because there's only like about 10 computers on the network at this point so i never did try down but you know the worst that could happen it was it would affect 10 computers anyway uh getting to the uh the crux of the story so uh this was uh something that happened in 1987 march 31st actually and it was uh started by jordan hubbard who was quite well known at the time i think he's quite uh well known in the early internet he did a lot of good work with free software and so on and he was manager of one of berkeley's um distributed uh computing groups at the time and he too like me i suspect looked at these new commands and said oh this our wall thing oh that that could be interesting i'll i'll send a quick message to all the people on the network and this universal group seems to be what uh what is needed to uh send it around so he he uh sent a quick message using this all wall command and uh not quite realizing what happened uh it didn't come back instantly usually it comes back quite quickly and says yes done done that but it didn't so he sort of left it and wandered off and went off to see if anybody had received it and when he got back to his uh workstation and sat down he did work out that quite a lot of people have received it in fact everybody on the internet at the time was starting to receive this so he killed the program but by that time the damage was done and he started getting a flood of emails in fact he got 743 emails from people all around the internet uh including because at this time the internet and the arpanet were still somewhat connected so they hadn't really set off the the military part from the regular internet so this sort of went you know around places like the pentagon um you know the the arpanet management everybody suddenly got this message splattered across their screen saying what was the message what did he actually say i don't know what the message was actually i think it was just something innocuous like hello whatever but but it was always preceded by quite a few lines saying this is a broadcast message from whoever and you've got quite a lot of the bell command the bell characters so it went ding ding ding ding ding ding on your terminal and then went across and on the sun you typically like like you do now you have several windows open wallet but it sort of hit every window there so so it's flat across every window saying something something important like um hi guys i'm just testing this out or something like that so it caused quite a stir at the time and apparently the some of the high up people in the internet uh were extremely annoyed by this and there was um the elders of the internet yes they contacted son and said you know what the hell do you think you're doing letting people just do this sort of thing and we demand this is patched in your very next release and uh get a quick fix out all this thing uh jordan meanwhile was um he was uh obviously um inundated with messages i said 743 messages which he to his credit replied to each one individually with sort of a stock answer so there's quite a few versions of that floating around yeah it's a little unfortunate you know he he's done a lot of good work i think he works for nvidia now so yeah he's a very talented software engineer but if you look at his wikipedia page it does list a few of those things but half of it is about this our wall incident that uh that triggered you probably made a few friends doing that actually i think probably 50 50 uh when you get to look at it there's certainly a lot of people you know it wasn't malicious at all or anything like that it was just annoying at that time was nottingham on the internet no we weren't we were sort of we had abridged the internet and uh so it was yeah it wouldn't have queued and waited to get to you though whoever's there right now yeah i think it got to university college london who we worked with quite a lot in those days and they were on the end of the satellite link at that point i think it got through to them i think i had a few uh friends who who got it but it luckily didn't get through to us and uh i guess it didn't get through to everyone because apparently the way it worked was it said oh this this is going to everybody right i will go through all the list of known hosts on your computer and just go through one at a time contacting each and send send it off there and at that point we hadn't got the dns it was still a sort of a host list file so it just went all the way through there and uh and because they were actually very well connected avertly to the internet it managed to get everywhere right so we're here we can't go to s we can only go to l that's a nice easy one so i need to find l so l goes to c and it's three plus two is five so l comes in one column to start with and each of these nodes with within network has connections to other nodes this is how you initialize networkyeah that is sort of like the the the offline equivalent to somebody finding an address book and literally ringing every number in there or yeah or text text all your contacts you know like oh yeah yeah text all that that sort of thing so it's very similar to that but it's just that in their case all was the entire internet with the original unix systems where we had a system called write where you could write to other people and that was very handy for in fact i'll do a quick screen uh grab of that working this then is an attempt to try and reconstruct what it looked a little like in the 1980s when we were all working on mainframe or mini computers at that time so in this case it was a pdp 1170 which was sitting in the basement there were terminals all around the building all physically wired in so there's a wire from each terminal down through the trunking to the basement and plugged into the back of the pdp 1170 there was a room with about 20 or so terminals that were general use and then the staff people all had terminals in their own office and you'd sit down at the terminal and you'd log in and do whatever you're going to do often the first thing you type is who which would show you who is connected onto the computer who is logged in and who is available and this is kind of a common thing i would see early on there's dave browsford logged in eric foxley andy walker william armitage and a computer file and also me of course as uh systems evolved a little weak we had another command called w which did much the same thing you could see who's logged in there and also what they're running in this case they're all running the shell but you could also see the idle time there this this column down here that would give you an idea of whether they had recently done anything on the computer or whether they'd wandered away so if you wanted to go and talk to someone you could see if they're actually at their computer even better than that you could uh communicate directly with them so there was a small utility called write which allowed you to write to somebody else and this obviously saved you walking around the building to try and find them if you could see they were logged in and uh available you could just go ahead and say right dfb in this case and uh down here you can see a message has appeared then type and uh it would appear there and dfb could write back and you know it's quite primitive but uh we used it quite a lot and write was actually a very simple program it just read a line and wrote it to the user's device that was really very useful during the early days that uh because in the early days we're all connected to the same computer and we're all sort of a big community and if you did something that used up a lot of uh processing power or something everybody would shout at you and you'd get these messages coming to you but it was also good just to uh before wandering around the apartment to go and see if anybody was uh logged into the computer and you could go and chat to them and you can actually see uh the user's device here if you type who then this this line here this tty or a pseudo tty in this case is is the actual uh device and that's actually a device in the file system on unix so you could actually look at that so pts two is dfbs although the security has been uh up since then so i'll have to play a couple of tricks to get this to work you can actually do that directly you can just and just echo something straight into that file and it appears over here on on this file so that's you know it's really quite simple uh as i say uh security's improved since then so you can't do that now and even then though you could say message and that says either yes or no so you could say message no i don't want to receive messages so if he now tried to write it back then it would say sorry he doesn't want to be communicated to at the moment if you're busy but usually most people around with that aren't whatever you happen to be doing it just appeared in the middle of your screen so if you're in the middle of an editor um you know if i put that back on and start adding something here then this just appears splashed across your screen and you have to refresh it to get rid of it so that was uh one system it's kind of like a precursor to the instant messaging i guess but uh very very very primitive as uh as you might show in some of the screen crafts uh then we also had this program called wall which was a sort of a building up from that from right to all users and that was typically used either if things got desperate on the computers that uh somebody was using far too much cpu and it was effective everybody simply might send a wall message to all the users saying okay own up who's burning through all the cpu and slowing all my stuff down but it was also part of the shutdown process if you tried to shut down the computer then usually you'd give it a time and say shut down in five minutes and it would broadcast this message to all the users saying the machine is going down but that used this command called wall and and that would appear on everybody's terminal so uh that was quite a useful thing we didn't i don't think you could use uh wall as a regular user i think you have to be a system admin because it you know splattered across everyone's terminals it was quite fun as we had this room called c30 with the banks of terminals and when somebody sent a wall message it would sort of appear on the first one second accompanied by a load of beeps as well so it would sort of ripple across the whole terminal room saying a machine is going down and you certainly knew about it because they had quite a loud beat these tvi 912s then as we slowly moved into the sort of uh internet networking version of this i remember we received our first couple of sun machines in the department and i started looking at those and seeing what uh commands they had they had another new command called talk where you could that was a bit more interactive and you could chat with somebody with this there was only two ways i remember i think it may have been extended into multi-way later but that was basically like the right you just typed in stuff and uh you could see it but amongst the commands that you got with the new sun system now that we're all networked was a load of commands that were started with r so there's an r shell to log in remotely to a computer which has been subsumed by ssh now a secure shell because it certainly wasn't secure there was an r exec to run programs there was um there was an ahu and a few other things but but you had a bunch of these new commands with the letter r in front of them and while i was looking through them i discovered this command called our wall which was the remote version of wool so you could write to all users across the network and i do remember looking at this and there was some configuration examples and one of the configurations they have this file called netgroups that said this is a sort of a shorthand for who you want to contact so you could sort of say our wall to all people on your local network or pick out a specific set of machines that it would broadcast to but i do remember looking at it and thinking this is a bit odd because there's a universal group there and they defined the universal group as sort of the absence of everything so you could say i think which users you want to talk to which machines and which networks but if you missed all of those out then the default was to send it to everywhere literally everywhere literally everywhere that was fine on at nottingham because there's only like about 10 computers on the network at this point so i never did try down but you know the worst that could happen it was it would affect 10 computers anyway uh getting to the uh the crux of the story so uh this was uh something that happened in 1987 march 31st actually and it was uh started by jordan hubbard who was quite well known at the time i think he's quite uh well known in the early internet he did a lot of good work with free software and so on and he was manager of one of berkeley's um distributed uh computing groups at the time and he too like me i suspect looked at these new commands and said oh this our wall thing oh that that could be interesting i'll i'll send a quick message to all the people on the network and this universal group seems to be what uh what is needed to uh send it around so he he uh sent a quick message using this all wall command and uh not quite realizing what happened uh it didn't come back instantly usually it comes back quite quickly and says yes done done that but it didn't so he sort of left it and wandered off and went off to see if anybody had received it and when he got back to his uh workstation and sat down he did work out that quite a lot of people have received it in fact everybody on the internet at the time was starting to receive this so he killed the program but by that time the damage was done and he started getting a flood of emails in fact he got 743 emails from people all around the internet uh including because at this time the internet and the arpanet were still somewhat connected so they hadn't really set off the the military part from the regular internet so this sort of went you know around places like the pentagon um you know the the arpanet management everybody suddenly got this message splattered across their screen saying what was the message what did he actually say i don't know what the message was actually i think it was just something innocuous like hello whatever but but it was always preceded by quite a few lines saying this is a broadcast message from whoever and you've got quite a lot of the bell command the bell characters so it went ding ding ding ding ding ding on your terminal and then went across and on the sun you typically like like you do now you have several windows open wallet but it sort of hit every window there so so it's flat across every window saying something something important like um hi guys i'm just testing this out or something like that so it caused quite a stir at the time and apparently the some of the high up people in the internet uh were extremely annoyed by this and there was um the elders of the internet yes they contacted son and said you know what the hell do you think you're doing letting people just do this sort of thing and we demand this is patched in your very next release and uh get a quick fix out all this thing uh jordan meanwhile was um he was uh obviously um inundated with messages i said 743 messages which he to his credit replied to each one individually with sort of a stock answer so there's quite a few versions of that floating around yeah it's a little unfortunate you know he he's done a lot of good work i think he works for nvidia now so yeah he's a very talented software engineer but if you look at his wikipedia page it does list a few of those things but half of it is about this our wall incident that uh that triggered you probably made a few friends doing that actually i think probably 50 50 uh when you get to look at it there's certainly a lot of people you know it wasn't malicious at all or anything like that it was just annoying at that time was nottingham on the internet no we weren't we were sort of we had abridged the internet and uh so it was yeah it wouldn't have queued and waited to get to you though whoever's there right now yeah i think it got to university college london who we worked with quite a lot in those days and they were on the end of the satellite link at that point i think it got through to them i think i had a few uh friends who who got it but it luckily didn't get through to us and uh i guess it didn't get through to everyone because apparently the way it worked was it said oh this this is going to everybody right i will go through all the list of known hosts on your computer and just go through one at a time contacting each and send send it off there and at that point we hadn't got the dns it was still a sort of a host list file so it just went all the way through there and uh and because they were actually very well connected avertly to the internet it managed to get everywhere right so we're here we can't go to s we can only go to l that's a nice easy one so i need to find l so l goes to c and it's three plus two is five so l comes in one column to start with and each of these nodes with within network has connections to other nodes this is how you initialize network\n"