Hacking Old School Unix

OK, my grandfather just showed me an old school Unix computer. He got it from a garage sale and it weighs a ton.

It works, I boot it up and it works, its unix v 3 or something, it is only a 40 mb to give you an idea of how old it is.

Unfortunatly when he baught it no one gave him the username and password required to get into the system. I was wondering if anyone here knows of any unix override passwords or something so we can get into this badboy and view the past.

If anyone knows any way to get into it, I would greatly appreicate it. I obviously wasent born at the time this computer was made and I am really looking forward to seeing what it does.

Also, if it helps you out any, when I put in any username and press return or enter, and it asks for the password, it will not let me type anything for the password.

Please help, thanks.

Unix doesn't echo anything when you're typing a password. So it's probably letting you type a password, you just can't see that you're doing so, but it's there. You should be trying to get access with the user "root" in case you didn't know.

This is how to recover / reset a password for current versions of Unix (FreeBSD in this case).

well first i wanna thank you for your timley reply. The not echoing password thing makes sence too, that was what I figured.

Infortunatly the link yopu gave me is for current versions of unix, this is version 3.51 or something around there.

I just booted it up again. and there was not anything like what that article discribed. Thhere was no "press space to boot now" or go to command option, it just boots up, checks the hard disk, it than checks the floppy and the memory, than it seems to reset, checks the hard disk again, checksd the floopy than the memory than it loads the drivers than it finally sets up the screen.

When that screen comes up it says "Welcome to AT&T Unix" and it asks for a login.

Unfortunatly I dident get to that part before it shut off and started making a sound. If you give me another way to get the root pass for this version I will try it again, but I dont wanna start a fire in my grandparents house :-/

You might give Google a whirl. I used "at&t unix" and got plenty of results, but I don't know if they're relevant to the computer you have.

In short, there are no 'hacks' of this sort. If you don't know a username, and there is no single-user-boot or password recovery thing, you can't get in with that operating system in place...
What is the CPU, and do you have a cd or floppy drive?
You'll probably have to modify the password file, I don't what that would be on older Unix, maybe /etc/passwd?

without OS, the only way i see is: attach the disk to an oder
unix-sys, mount the root partition, edit /mounted/etc/passwd

This can be done. You need to look for a tool. I won't feed the script kiddies, but it can be done with a little persistance and the right files on a floppy