Wheel (computing)

In computing, the term wheel refers to a user account with a wheel bit, a system setting that provides additional special system privileges that empower a user to execute restricted commands that ordinary user accounts cannot access.^[1][2]

Origins

The term wheel was first applied to computer user privilege levels after the introduction of the TENEX operating system, later distributed under the name TOPS-20 in the 1960s and early 1970s.^[2][3] The term was derived from the slang phrase big wheel, referring to a person with great power or influence.^[1]

In the 1980s, the term was imported into Unix culture due to the migration of operating system developers and users from TENEX/TOPS-20 to Unix.^[2]

Wheel group

Modern Unix systems generally use user groups as a security protocol to control access privileges. The wheel group is a special user group used on some Unix systems to control access to the su^[4][5] or sudo command, which allows a user to masquerade as another user (usually the super user).^[1][2][6]

Wheel war

The phrase wheel war, which originated at Stanford University,^[7] was first documented in the 1983 version of The Jargon File. A 'wheel war' was characterized as a part of an immature 'larval phase' wherein students with administrative privileges would attempt to lock each other out of a university's multi-user (see also:multiseat) computer system, sometimes causing unintentional harm to other users.^[8] By January 2006, it had come into colloquial use amongst Wikipedia administrators in reference to the misuse of administrative tools by one administrator against another administrator, during editor disagreements and disputes.^[9]

References