few days?
"But given that Thompson's eight character password hash was cracked in a few days,....."
On modern hardware, using modern algorythms.... I very much doubt that anything they had in the day could have brute-forced that password in any time within a human lifetime. (And remembering the extortive rates for run time in the day, you'd need the budget of a moderately-sized industrialised nation to even try...).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
