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.¹² The term is derived from the slang term big wheel, referring to a person with great power or influence,¹ and was first used in this context with regard to the TENEX operating system, later distributed under the name TOPS-20 in the 1960s and early 1970s. ²³

Because of the movement of operating system developers and users from TENEX/TOPS-20 to Unix, the term was likewise adopted by the Unix community in the 1980s.² In many Unix systems, the su command could be used to gain superuser access to a machine. Modern Unix implementations generally add an additional layer of security by requiring that a user be a member of the wheel user privileges group in order to access the su command.⁴²¹

Wheel war

A wheel war is a contest between privileged users on a shared, on-line computer system, in which each user discovers or invents ways to interfere with others' use of the system.^{citation needed} The phrase was used in early hacker culture to refer to system disruption caused by students gaining wheel access in order to log other students out or erase their files, with collateral damage caused to the work of other uninvolved users of the system. ⁵

References

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