> VMS had, IIRC, 32 privileges or so,

I think it was more like 40 or 50, at least when I used it (early- to
mid-'80s).  I have a fairly clear (given the age) memory that it was
more than one longword of bits.

> and you could group several of them into a set you might as well call
> "root-complete" because if you had any one in the set you could as a
> SMoP accomplish whatever any of the others purportedly controlled.

Yes...things like SETPRV (the most obvious, probably) and CMKRNL
(perhaps next most obvious), but also things like the one whose name
I've forgotten that let you do "physical" I/O - read and write disks
raw, in particular - and probably CMEXEC as well if you groveled over
the microfiche enough to grok the filesystem code.  BYPASS probably
counted; READALL might have, but I never dug around enough to figure
out how to leverage it into full keys to the system - and it would
probably depend on something like snooping someone's typing.  I don't
remember any other root-complete ones offhand, but it's been a long
time since I looked at the privilege set.

/~\ The ASCII				der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML	       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
/ \ Email!	     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B