The passwords were only if you were connecting over the network. If you were using a directly attached terminal, you didn't need one.

RMS insisted that everyone use their UNAME as their password, but he wasn't widely listened to because the whole reason PWORD came into effect was because turists were getting increasingly destructive. People weren't happy when their mail got marked read (or worse, deleted) because some random from the network had logged in as them simply because they could and did not understand what their automatic login script was doing.

Login in was just a 'gentleman' policy. Everyone would just have root permissions and help/get helped from anywhere to anywhere in the system.

That was only true in very early systems. By the time of the PDP-10, HACTRN will nag you to log in if you run most commands and the gunner would kill off your job after a relatively short interval (the exact interval differed from machine to machine).

Still more open than Unix. Also if you got your hands on DDT, it would be a non-issue.

HACTRN is the (timesharing top level job) DDT.