Wheel (computing)

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]

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, mostly BSD systems,[4] to control access to the su[5][6] or sudo command, which allows a user to masquerade as another user (usually the super user).[1][2][7] Debian-like operating systems create a group called sudo with similar purpose to wheel group.[4]

The phrase wheel war, which originated at Stanford University,[8] 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.[9]